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Title: The Six Enneads
Creator(s): Plotinus
MacKenna, Stephen (Translator)
Page, B. S. (Translator)
Rights: Public Domain
CCEL Subjects: All
LC Call no: PA3612.P68
LC Subjects:
Greek literature
Translations
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250 AD
THE SIX ENNEADS
by Plotinus
translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page
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THE FIRST ENNEAD
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FIRST TRACTATE.
THE ANIMATE AND THE MAN.
1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where
have these affections and experiences their seat?
Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the
body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third
entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend
or a distinct form due to the blending.
And what applies to the affections applies also to whatsoever acts,
physical or mental, spring from them.
We have, therefore, to examine discursive-reason and the ordinary
mental action upon objects of sense, and enquire whether these have the
one seat with the affections and experiences, or perhaps sometimes the
one seat, sometimes another.
And we must consider also our acts of Intellection, their mode and
their seat.
And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in
these matters, must be brought to light.
Firstly, what is the seat of Sense-Perception? This is the obvious
beginning since the affections and experiences either are sensations of
some kind or at least never occur apart from sensation.
2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature
of the Soul -- that is whether a distinction is to be made between Soul
and Essential Soul [between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in
itself]. [1]
If such a distinction holds, then the Soul [in man] is some sort of a
composite and at once we may agree that it is a recipient and -- if
only reason allows -- that all the affections and experiences really
have their seat in the Soul, and with the affections every state and
mood, good and bad alike.
But if Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the
Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it
imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of
its own which Reason manifests.
If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the Soul as an immortal --
if the immortal, the imperishable, must be impassive, giving out
something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for
what it receives from the Existents prior to itself from which
Existents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered.
Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the
outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for courage: courage
implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by
the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something very
different from the Soul, to that only which admits of replenishment and
voidance.
And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture? An essential is
not mixed. Or of the intrusion of anything alien? If it did, it would
be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be equally far
from it. And Grief -- how or for what could it grieve? Whatever
possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling, unchangeable, within
its own peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing,
not even anything good, can accrue? What such an Existent is, it is
unchangeably.
Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning; and all our
ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul: for sensation is a
receiving -- whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body -- and
reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.
The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the
intellections -- whether these are to be assigned to the Soul -- and as
to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary
state.
3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body -- whether it be set above
it or actually within it -- since the association of the two
constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.
Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument,
it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a
man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which
he is working.
It may be objected that the Soul must however, have Sense-Perception
since its use of its instrument must acquaint it with the external
conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be
argued, the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring
distress to the soul: hence the Soul may feel sorrow and pain and every
other affection that belongs to the body; and from this again will
spring desire, the Soul seeking the mending of its instrument.
But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to
Soul? Body may communicate qualities or conditions to another body: but
-- body to Soul? Something happens to A; does that make it happen to B?
As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct
entities; if the Soul uses the body it is separate from it.
But apart from the philosophical separation how does Soul stand to
body?
Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are
possible. There might be a complete coalescence: Soul might be
interwoven through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or
an Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part
of the Soul detached and another part in contact, the disjoined part
being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument
or thing used.
In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct
this lower Soul towards the higher, the agent, and except in so far as
the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the
instrument, the body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or
through this inferior.
4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a coalescence.
Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler
degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant
in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought
lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such
as Sense-Perception?
No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with
life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then,
will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by
the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the
body's doom to fail of its joys and to perish.
Then again we should have to examine how such a coalescence could be
conceived: we might find it impossible: perhaps all this is like
announcing the coalescence of things utterly incongruous in kind, let
us say of a line and whiteness.
Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body:
such a relation would not give woof and warp community of sensation:
the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating
soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body -- as
light goes always free of all it floods -- and all the more so, since,
precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the
entire frame.
Under such an interweaving, then, the Soul would not be subjected to
the body's affections and experiences: it would be present rather as
Ideal-Form in Matter.
Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if
-- the first possibility -- the Soul is an essence, a self-existent, it
can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more
decidedly be the Using-Principle [and therefore unaffected].
Suppose, next, the Soul to be present like axe-form on iron: here, no
doubt, the form is all important but it is still the axe, the
complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the
iron thus modified: on this analogy, therefore, we are even more
strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination to
the body: their natural seat is the material member, the instrument,
the potential recipient of life.
Compare the passage where we read [2] that "it is absurd to suppose
that the Soul weaves"; equally absurd to think of it as desiring,
grieving. All this is rather in the province of something which we may
call the Animate.
5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might
be the Couplement of Soul and body: it might be a third and different
entity formed from both.
The Soul in turn -- apart from the nature of the Animate -- must be
either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow,
or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences
with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for example
in the Animate may be something quite distinct from the accompanying
movement or state in the desiring faculty.
The body, the live-body as we know it, we will consider later.
Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering,
for example, be seated in this Couplement?
It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a
distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into
Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation
unexplained.
Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement:
some evil seems to have befallen the man or his belongings and this
conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire
Animate. But this account leaves still a question as to the source and
seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to the Couplement?
Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the
feeling of grief: the judgement might very well arise and the grief by
no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet not be angry;
and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a
pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than before to any warrant for
assigning these affections to the Couplement.
Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a
Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and, collectively,
that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such a statement
of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to the
Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone or in
the body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in
the carnal passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile,
a well-defined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse
towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others
too, it would belong necessarily to the Soul alone.
Reason, then, does not permit us to assign all the affections to the
Couplement.
In the case of carnal desire, it will certainly be the Man that
desires, and yet, on the other hand, there must be desire in the
Desiring-Faculty as well. How can this be? Are we to suppose that, when
the man originates the desire, the Desiring-Faculty moves to the order?
How could the Man have come to desire at all unless through a prior
activity in the Desiring-Faculty? Then it is the Desiring-Faculty that
takes the lead? Yet how, unless the body be first in the appropriate
condition?
6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are
contained by a recipient, every action or state expressive of them must
be the action or state of that recipient, they themselves remaining
unaffected as merely furnishing efficiency.
But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the recipient of the
Causing-Principle [i.e., the Soul] which brings life to the Couplement,
this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and
expressive activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the
Animate.
But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the Soul but to the
Couplement; or at least the life of the Couplement would not be the
life of the Soul; Sense-Perception would belong not to the
Sensitive-Faculty but to the container of the faculty.
But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in
Soul, how the soul lack sensation? The very presence of the
Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the Soul.
Once again, where is Sense-Perception seated?
In the Couplement.
Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in
the Sensitive-Faculty, the Soul left out of count and the Soul-Faculty?
7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by
virtue of the Soul's presence.
This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in
itself to form either the Couplement or the body.
No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light,
which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle,
the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all
the other experiences found to belong to the Animate.
But the "We"? How have We Sense-Perception?
By the fact that We are not separate from the Animate so constituted,
even though certainly other and nobler elements go to make up the
entire many-sided nature of Man.
The faculty of perception in the Soul cannot act by the immediate
grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions
printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already
Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other
[of that in the Soul] which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being
an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms.
And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single
lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning,
Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly
the We: before this there was only the "Ours"; but at this stage stands
the WE [the authentic Human-Principle] loftily presiding over the
Animate.
There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be
described as the Animate or Living-Being -- mingled in a lower phase,
but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from
all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple
brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate
of the reasoning Soul, in our reasoning it is this "We" that reasons,
in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the Soul.
8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this
I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations
from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself
[Divine-Mind].
This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either
as common to all or as our own immediate possession: or again we may
possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible
-- one, everywhere and always Its entire self -- and severally in that
each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul [i.e. in the
Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul].
Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as
it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle,
concentrated, one.
And how do we possess the Divinity?
In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and
Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for
the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul --
we read -- and that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For,
note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All,
as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are
Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material
masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact
that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging
into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or
likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.
The first of these images is Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement;
and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized
as phases of the Soul in lessening succession from one another, until
the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all
production of offspring -- offspring efficient in its turn, in
contradistinction to the engendering Soul which [has no direct action
within matter but] produces by mere inclination towards what it
fashions.
9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that
can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers; for all such
evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement.
But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go
guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it: for all this
lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is
evil.
When we have done evil it is because we have been worsted by our baser
side -- for a man is many -- by desire or rage or some evil image: the
misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality fancy, has
not stayed for the judgement of the Reasoning-Principle: we have acted
at the call of the less worthy, just as in matters of the sense-sphere
we sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception,
that of the Couplement, without applying the tests of the
Reasoning-Faculty.
The Intellectual-Principle has held aloof from the act and so is
guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on whether we ourselves
have or have not put ourselves in touch with the Intellectual-Realm
either in the Intellectual-Principle or within ourselves; for it is
possible at once to possess and not to use.
Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands
by itself: the one group has the character of body and never exists
apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its
manifestation belongs peculiarly to Soul: and the Understanding, as
passing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the point of the vision
of Ideal-Forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation
(i.e., with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the
Understanding in the Veritable Soul. For Understanding, the true, is
the Act of the Intellections: in many of its manifestations it is the
assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the inner.
Thus in spite of all, the Soul is at peace as to itself and within
itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we experience are the issue
of what is subjoined to the Soul, and are, as have said, the states and
experiences of this elusive "Couplement."
10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We [the
personality] and We are subject to these states then the Soul must be
subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the
Soul.
But it has been observed that the Couplement, too -- especially before
our emancipation -- is a member of this total We, and in fact what the
body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct
notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends
the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the true man is the
other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which
belong to the Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate
Soul, the Soul which even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [This
Soul constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn,
that other Soul which is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws
also, drawn after it.
Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from contemplative
wisdom but from custom or practical discipline belong to the
Couplement: to the Couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its
repugnances, desires, sympathies.
And Friendship?
This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the
interior man.
11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is
but little irradiation from the higher principles of our being: but
when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their
action is directed towards the Supreme; they work upon us only when
they stand at the mid-point.
But does not the include that phase of our being which stands above the
mid-point?
It does, but on condition that we lay hold of it: our entire nature is
not ours at all times but only as we direct the mid-point upwards or
downwards, or lead some particular phase of our nature from
potentiality or native character into act.
And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the Animate?
If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned,
then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase does not enter
directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they are
aware only of the image of the Soul [only of the lower Soul] and of
that only by being aware of the body organised and determined by that
image.
If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them
by a radiation from the All-Soul.
12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a
contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the
other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is
doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body.
We may take either view at will: they are easily reconciled.
When we tell of the sinless Soul, we make Soul and Essential-Soul one
and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity.
By the Soul subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that
other, that phase of the Soul which knows all the states and passions:
the Soul in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it falls under the
conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is that
sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty.
It is in this sense that we read of the Soul: "We saw it as those
others saw the sea-god Glaukos." "And," reading on, "if we mean to
discern the nature of the Soul we must strip it free of all that has
gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it, examine with
what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it is
what it is."
Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet
another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this body
only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at
birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other [lower]
phase of the Soul. For the meaning of birth has been indicated
elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something
being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in the
declension.
Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it not
certainly sin?
If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object
beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed not to
the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not
there, the light could cause no shadow.
And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it
illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall only if there
be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut
off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being
when the whole Soul is looking toward the Supreme.
The poet, too, in the story of Hercules, seems to give this image
separate existence; he puts the shade of Hercules in the lower world
and Hercules himself among the gods: treating the hero as existing in
the two realms at once, he gives us a twofold Hercules.
It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of
practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a
God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the Contemplation
which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while
he has place above, something of him remains below.
13. And the principle that reasons out these matters? Is it We or the
Soul?
We, but by the Soul.
But how "by the Soul"? Does this mean that the Soul reasons by
possession [by contact with the matters of enquiry]?
No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists without movement; or
any movement that can be ascribed to it must be utterly distinct from
all corporal movement and be simply the Soul's own life.
And Intellection in us is twofold: since the Soul is intellective, and
Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have Intellection both by
the characteristic Act of our Soul and by the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle upon us -- for this Intellectual-Principle is
part of us no less than the Soul, and towards it we are ever rising.
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[1] All matter shown in brackets is added by the translator for
clearness' sake and, therefore, is not canonical. S.M.
[2] ";We read" translates "he says" of the text, and always indicates a
reference to Plato, whose name does not appear in the translation
except where it was written by Plotinus. S.M.
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SECOND TRACTATE.
ON VIRTUE.
1. Since Evil is here, "haunting this world by necessary law," and it
is the Soul's design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence.
But what is this escape?
"In attaining Likeness to God," we read. And this is explained as
"becoming just and holy, living by wisdom," the entire nature grounded
in Virtue.
But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being
that has Virtue? To what Divine Being, then, would our Likeness be? To
the Being -- must we not think? -- in Which, above all, such excellence
seems to inhere, that is to the Soul of the Kosmos and to the Principle
ruling within it, the Principle endowed with a wisdom most wonderful.
What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should
become Like to its ruler?
But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this
Divine-Being all the virtues find place -- Moral-Balance [Sophrosyne],
for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is
alien; where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the
desire of possession.
If, indeed, that aspiration towards the Intelligible which is in our
nature exists also in this Ruling-Power, then need not look elsewhere
for the source of order and of the virtues in ourselves.
But does this Power possess the Virtues?
We cannot expect to find There what are called the Civic Virtues, the
Prudence which belongs to the reasoning faculty; the Fortitude which
conducts the emotional and passionate nature; the Sophrosyne which
consists in a certain pact, in a concord between the passionate faculty
and the reason; or Rectitude which is the due application of all the
other virtues as each in turn should command or obey.
Is Likeness, then, attained, perhaps, not by these virtues of the
social order but by those greater qualities known by the same general
name? And if so do the Civic Virtues give us no help at all?
It is against reason, utterly to deny Likeness by these while admitting
it by the greater: tradition at least recognizes certain men of the
civic excellence as divine, and we must believe that these too had in
some sort attained Likeness: on both levels there is virtue for us,
though not the same virtue.
Now, if it be admitted that Likeness is possible, though by a varying
use of different virtues and though the civic virtues do not suffice,
there is no reason why we should not, by virtues peculiar to our state,
attain Likeness to a model in which virtue has no place.
But is that conceivable?
When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be
something to warm the source of the warmth?
If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that
fire?
Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of
the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an
essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the
argument would make Virtue something communicated to the Soul but an
essential constituent of the Principle from which the Soul attaining
Likeness absorbs it.
Against the illustration drawn from the fire, it may be urged that the
analogy would make that Principle identical with virtue, whereas we
hold it to be something higher.
The objection would be valid if what the soul takes in were one and the
same with the source, but in fact virtue is one thing, the source of
virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the
house conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness: the
material house has distribution and order while the pure idea is not
constituted by any such elements; distribution, order, symmetry are not
parts of an idea.
So with us: it is from the Supreme that we derive order and
distribution and harmony, which are virtues in this sphere: the
Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution,
have nothing to do with virtue; and, none the less, it is by our
possession of virtue that we become like to Them.
Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue
in no way involves the existence of virtue in the Supreme. But we have
not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must persuade as well as
demonstrate.
2. First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold
Likeness comes, and seek to establish what is this thing which, as we
possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the Supreme possesses
it, is in the nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue.
We must first distinguish two modes of Likeness.
There is the likeness demanding an identical nature in the objects
which, further, must draw their likeness from a common principle: and
there is the case in which B resembles A, but A is a Primal, not
concerned about B and not said to resemble B. In this second case,
likeness is understood in a distinct sense: we no longer look for
identity of nature, but, on the contrary, for divergence since the
likeness has come about by the mode of difference.
What, then, precisely is Virtue, collectively and in the particular?
The clearer method will be to begin with the particular, for so the
common element by which all the forms hold the general name will
readily appear.
The Civic Virtues, on which we have touched above, are a principle or
order and beauty in us as long as we remain passing our life here: they
ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our
entire sensibility, and dispelling false judgement -- and this by sheer
efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the bounds, by the fact
that the measured is lifted outside of the sphere of the unmeasured and
lawless.
And, further, these Civic Virtues -- measured and ordered themselves
and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to
their forming -- are like to the measure reigning in the over-world,
and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while
utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness,
any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of
Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by
nearness: the Soul nearer than the body, therefore closer akin,
participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating
us into the delusion that in the Soul we see God entire.
This is the way in which men of the Civic Virtues attain Likeness.
3. We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the
fruit of the loftier virtues: discussing this we shall penetrate more
deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to define the
nature of the higher kind whose existence we shall establish beyond
doubt.
To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct orders of virtue, and
the civic does not suffice for Likeness: "Likeness to God," he says,
"is a flight from this world's ways and things": in dealing with the
qualities of good citizenship he does not use the simple term Virtue
but adds the distinguishing word civic: and elsewhere he declares all
the virtues without exception to be purifications.
But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does
purification issue in Likeness?
As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to
share the body's states and to think the body's thoughts, so it would
be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's
moods and devoted itself to its own Act -- the state of Intellection
and Wisdom -- never allowed the passions of the body to affect it --
the virtue of Sophrosyne -- knew no fear at the parting from the body
-- the virtue of Fortitude -- and if reason and the
Intellectual-Principle ruled -- in which state is Righteousness. Such a
disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and immune to
passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the Divine,
too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.
But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also?
No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. The Act of
Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine: of things in
the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all.
Then yet again, the one word Intellection covers two distinct Acts?
Rather there is primal Intellection and there is Intellection deriving
from the Primal and of other scope.
As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the
Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to say, as the uttered thought
is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought
above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere.
Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to
the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence.
4. We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of
this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue
follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does
the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less
perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term?
To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but
Goodness is something more.
If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness
suffices; but even so, not the act of cleansing but the cleansed thing
that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what this
emergent is.
It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The Absolute Good cannot be
thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only
as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and
unable to rest in the Authentic Good.
The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its
kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting strangers. There is no other
way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its
own; the new phase begins by a new orientation.
After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to be
made? No: by the purification the true alignment stands accomplished.
The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the
alignment brings about within.
And this is . . . ?
That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul
admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of the vision
it has come to.
But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten?
What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in
the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel the darkness, and thus
come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the
light.
Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures;
and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they
represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a
possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien
and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned
towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign,
just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
5. So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the
nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle? Identity
with what God?
The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel
the two orders of passion -- anger, desire and the like, with grief and
its kin -- and in what degree the disengagement from the body is
possible.
Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own place.
It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary
pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for
medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may
combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by
refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the
suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul
will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and
uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at that. The Soul
has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power
here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely
monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the
food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Soul's
attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there
must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be
entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it
will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting
fancy.
The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the
irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be,
then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it
takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's
presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the
neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer
shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason
is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for
any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own
weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.
6. In all this there is no sin -- there is only matter of discipline --
but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God.
As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold,
God and Demi-God, or rather God in association with a nature of a lower
power: when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled,
a Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.
For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the
Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the essential man is There:
entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning
phase of his nature and this he will lead up into likeness with his
highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible it
shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course
displeasing to its overlord.
What form, then, does virtue take in one so lofty?
It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that
exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of
the Intellectual-Principle itself.
And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in
the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul; and there is the
Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present
to the Soul: this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not
Virtue.
In the Supreme, then, what is it?
Its proper Act and Its Essence.
That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form,
constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not
self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so
to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue:
for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme is
self-standing, independent.
But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of faculty, does it not
always imply the existence of diverse parts?
No: There is a Rectitude of Diversity appropriate to what has parts,
but there is another, not less Rectitude than the former though it
resides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-Rectitude is the Act of
a Unity upon itself, of a Unity in which there is no this and that and
the other.
On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct
its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle: its Restraint (Sophrosyne)
is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle; its Fortitude
is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze
is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by
virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state
arising in its less noble companion.
7. The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that
existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the
Intellectual-Principle.
In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom;
self-concentration is Sophrosyne; Its proper Act is Its Dutifulness;
Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself is the
equivalent of Fortitude.
In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle
is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme
where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have
similar correspondences.
And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then
the purification of the Soul must produce all the virtues; if any are
lacking, then not one of them is perfect.
And to possess the greater is potentially to possess the minor, though
the minor need not carry the greater with them.
Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage; but
whether his possession of the minor virtues be actual as well as
potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to
qualities higher still, must be decided afresh in each several case.
Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom. If other guides of conduct
must be called in to meet a given need, can this virtue hold its ground
even in mere potentiality?
And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope
and province? Where, for example, Sophrosyne would allow certain acts
or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off
altogether? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once
Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action?
The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give:
thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need
demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards
these in turn will define his conduct: for example, Restraint in its
earlier form will no longer satisfy him; he will work for the final
Disengagement; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man
-- such as Civic Virtue commends -- but, leaving this beneath him, will
take up instead another life, that of the Gods.
For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to
model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we
have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme
Exemplar.
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
ON DIALECTIC [THE UPWARD WAY].
1. What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there
where we must go?
The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have
established elsewhere, by many considerations, that our journey is to
the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed, the very reasoning
which discovered the Term was itself something like an initiation.
But what order of beings will attain the Term?
Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most things,
those who at their first birth have entered into the life-germ from
which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover, the
metaphysician taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the
nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside guidance.
But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or is there a distinct
method for each class of temperament?
For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making upwards or
have already gained the upper sphere.
The first degree is the conversion from the lower life; the second --
held by those that have already made their way to the sphere of the
Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint there but must still
advance within the realm -- lasts until they reach the extreme hold of
the place, the Term attained when the topmost peak of the Intellectual
realm is won.
But this highest degree must bide its time: let us first try to speak
of the initial process of conversion.
We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the
musician first and indicate his temperamental equipment for the task.
The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to beauty,
drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of his own
impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the timid are
sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they convey; all that
offends against unison or harmony in melodies and rhythms repels him;
he longs for measure and shapely pattern.
This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a man; he
must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of sense: he
must learn to distinguish the material forms from the
Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these correspondences and
of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of art: he must be led to the
Beauty that manifests itself through these forms; he must be shown that
what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual
world and the Beauty in that sphere, not some one shape of beauty but
the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must
be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it,
he possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show later.
2. The born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain -- and
then either come to a stand or pass beyond -- has a certain memory of
beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it:
spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His
lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before
some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental
discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle
underlying all, a Principle apart from the material forms, springing
from another source, and elsewhere more truly present. The beauty, for
example, in a noble course of life and in an admirably organized social
system may be pointed out to him -- a first training this in the
loveliness of the immaterial -- he must learn to recognise the beauty
in the arts, sciences, virtues; then these severed and particular forms
must be brought under the one principle by the explanation of their
origin. From the virtues he is to be led to the Intellectual-Principle,
to the Authentic-Existent; thence onward, he treads the upward way.
3. The metaphysician, equipped by that very character, winged already
and not like those others, in need of disengagement, stirring of
himself towards the supernal but doubting of the way, needs only a
guide. He must be shown, then, and instructed, a willing wayfarer by
his very temperament, all but self-directed.
Mathematics, which as a student by nature he will take very easily,
will be prescribed to train him to abstract thought and to faith in the
unembodied; a moral being by native disposition, he must be led to make
his virtue perfect; after the Mathematics he must be put through a
course in Dialectic and made an adept in the science.
4. But this science, this Dialectic essential to all the three classes
alike, what, in sum, is it?
It is the Method, or Discipline, that brings with it the power of
pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of things --
what each is, how it differs from others, what common quality all have,
to what Kind each belongs and in what rank each stands in its Kind and
whether its Being is Real-Being, and how many Beings there are, and how
many non-Beings to be distinguished from Beings.
Dialectic treats also of the Good and the not-Good, and of the
particulars that fall under each, and of what is the Eternal and what
the not Eternal -- and of these, it must be understood, not by
seeming-knowledge ["sense-knowledge"] but with authentic science.
All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense
and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own
peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and
pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic
division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the
Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it
establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all
that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire
Intellectual Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once
more, it returns to the point from which it starts.
Now rests: instructed and satisfied as to the Being in that sphere, it
is no longer busy about many things: it has arrived at Unity and it
contemplates: it leaves to another science all that coil of premisses
and conclusions called the art of reasoning, much as it leaves the art
of writing: some of the matter of logic, no doubt, it considers
necessary -- to clear the ground -- but it makes itself the judge, here
as in everything else; where it sees use, it uses; anything it finds
superfluous, it leaves to whatever department of learning or practice
may turn that matter to account.
5. But whence does this science derive its own initial laws?
The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for
any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic
puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached
perfect Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the purest [perfection] of
Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom." And, being the noblest method
and science that exists it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence,
The Highest there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or true-knowing] it
deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being.
What, then, is Philosophy?
Philosophy is the supremely precious.
Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the
mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic does not consist of bare
theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were,
Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences,
and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the
realities.
Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but
merely as something produced outside itself, something which it
recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the
falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of
truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions --
collections of words -- but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge,
knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows above all, the
operation of the soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too,
what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was
asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or
differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of
sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what
other science may care for such exercises.
6. Philosophy has other provinces, but Dialectic is its precious part:
in its study of the laws of the universe, Philosophy draws on Dialectic
much as other studies and crafts use Arithmetic, though, of course, the
alliance between Philosophy and Dialectic is closer.
And in Morals, too, Philosophy uses Dialectic: by Dialectic it comes to
contemplation, though it originates of itself the moral state or rather
the discipline from which the moral state develops.
Our reasoning faculties employ the data of Dialectic almost as their
proper possession for they are mainly concerned about Matter [whose
place and worth Dialectic establishes].
And while the other virtues bring the reason to bear upon particular
experiences and acts, the virtue of Wisdom [i.e., the virtue peculiarly
induced by Dialectic] is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the
Universal; for it deals with correspondence and sequence, the choice of
time for action and inaction, the adoption of this course, the
rejection of that other: Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of
presenting all things as Universals and stripped of matter for
treatment by the Understanding.
But can these inferior kinds of virtue exist without Dialectic and
philosophy?
Yes -- but imperfectly, inadequately.
And is it possible to be a Sage, Master in Dialectic, without these
lower virtues?
It would not happen: the lower will spring either before or together
with the higher. And it is likely that everyone normally possesses the
natural virtues from which, when Wisdom steps in, the perfected virtue
develops. After the natural virtues, then, Wisdom and, so the
perfecting of the moral nature. Once the natural virtues exist, both
orders, the natural and the higher, ripen side by side to their final
excellence: or as the one advances it carries forward the other towards
perfection.
But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in vision and in strength --
and to both orders of virtue the essential matter is from what
principles we derive them.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
ON TRUE HAPPINESS.
1. Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or
Prosperity and therefore within the reach of the other living beings as
well as ourselves?
There is certainly no reason to deny well-being to any of them as long
as their lot allows them to flourish unhindered after their kind.
Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant conditions of life, or in
the accomplishment of some appropriate task, by either account it may
fall to them as to us. For certainly they may at once be pleasantly
placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature: take
for an instance such living beings as have the gift of music; finding
themselves well-off in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is,
and so their day is pleasant to them.
And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate Term pursued by inborn
tendency, then on this head, too, we must allow it to animals from the
moment of their attaining this Ultimate: the nature in them comes to a
halt, having fulfilled its vital course from a beginning to an end.
It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-down of happiness so low
as to the animal world -- making it over, as then we must, even to the
vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they
too and having a life unfolding to a Term.
But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to deny that good of life to
animals only because they do not appear to man to be of great account.
And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord
to the other forms of life, since they have no feeling. It is true
people might be found to declare prosperity possible to the very
plants: they have life, and life may bring good or evil; the plants may
thrive or wither, bear or be barren.
No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the good of life, it is
impossible to deny the good of life to any order of living things; if
the Term be inner-peace, equally impossible; impossible, too, if the
good of life be to live in accordance with the purpose of nature.
2. Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they
lack sensation are really denying it to all living things.
By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of
well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the perception: to
be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without
knowledge: there is good in the appropriate state even though there be
no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality -- for it must be in
itself desirable.
This Good exists, then; is present: that in which it is present has
well-being without more ado: what need then to ask for sensation into
the bargain?
Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good of any state consists not
in the condition itself but in the knowledge and perception of it.
But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the bare
activity of the sentient life. And so it will be possessed by all that
feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that two constituents are
needed to make up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given
state felt: but how can it be maintained that the bringing together of
two neutrals can produce the Good?
They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of Good and
that such a condition constitutes well-being on the discernment of that
present good; but then they invite the question whether the well-being
comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or whether
there must further be the double recognition that the state is
agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.
If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon
sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and well-being is vested
not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent to discern
that pleasure is the Good.
Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the faculty
competent to pronounce as to pleasure's value. Now a judging entity is
nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of
Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can
never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and
declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order?
No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those
that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are in
reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and
setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the
bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of Reason?
But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely
they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a living being:
"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift
to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would you demand
it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"
If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the
reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long as, without
any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason becomes a
servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in
that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue.
If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not as
supplying these human needs, you must tell us what other services it
renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect thing
it is.
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such
planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite
different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself
one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those
first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be nobler
than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we
can be asked to rate it so highly.
Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which
they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose
to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can
make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.
3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that
lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be effectively happy
who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by
nature receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst
allowing it to the rational. If happiness were inherent in the bare
being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of happiness could
always take root would be simply life.
Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the
reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not really
making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning
faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property [not the
subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the
Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the basis
of the happiness: so that they are making it consist not in life but in
a particular kind of life -- not, of course, a species formally
opposite but, in terminology, standing as an "earlier" to a "later" in
the one Kind.
Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which shade down
from primal to secondary and so on, all massed under the common term --
life of plant and life of animal -- each phase brighter or dimmer than
its next: and so it evidently must be with the Good-of-Life. And if
thing is ever the image of thing, so every Good must always be the
image of a higher Good.
If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life,
and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to
the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives
fully.
And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good
if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme Good can be
no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its
greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something
essential not as something brought from without, a life needing no
foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in
good.
For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life?
If anyone should answer, "The nature of Good" [The Good, as a Divine
Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are
not seeking the Cause but the main constituent.
It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true
life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature beyond this
sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms
of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its
contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things
proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees,
this principle must be the first life and the most complete.
4. If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining
it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made over to the gods,
for the perfect life is for them alone.
But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must
consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus:
It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the
life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has
realised the perfect life.
But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported
into his nature?
No: there exists no single human being that does not either potentially
or effectively possess this thing which we hold to constitute
happiness.
But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect,
after the manner of a partial constituent of his entire nature?
We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion
of their total being -- in those, namely, that have it potentially --
there is, too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is
this perfection realized, who has passed over into actual
identification with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man,
not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his
because not appropriated to himself by any act of the will.
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
He himself by what he has and is.
And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme,
which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human
being after this other mode.
The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks
nothing else.
What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none of the less worthy
things; and the Best he carries always within him.
He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are
within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires
further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for
a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he
must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of
this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what
he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life
undiminished.
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is
stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends;
he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise,
know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does
bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him
which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose
distress he takes no part.
5. But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native
activity?
What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may
bring about? Could either welfare or happiness be present under such
conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which
will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those
never-failing "Miseries of Priam."
"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take
them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life
must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought
of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle
in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely . . .
until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings
penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be
counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the
misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a
state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the
less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout
all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent
be troubled, the other, answering to its associate's distress, must
perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to
cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that
self-contained unity essential to happiness."
6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness,
misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted
by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good,
why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be
happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into
happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all
that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But
if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our quest is of
a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and
noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul.
The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards freedom
from this sphere: the reason which disciplines away our concern about
this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order; it
merely resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek them;
essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards
the Soul's own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there
is rest -- and this is the veritably willed state of life.
There can be no such thing as "willing" the acquirement of necessaries,
if Will is to be taken in its strict sense, and not misapplied to the
mere recognition of need.
It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is
assuredly not what we should have willed; to have no occasion for any
such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste; but the things we
seek tell the story as soon as they are ours. For instance, health and
freedom from pain; which of these has any great charm? As long as we
possess them, we set no store upon them.
Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to happiness,
which when lacking is desired because of the presence of an annoying
opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good.
Such things can never make part of our final object: our Term must be
such that though these pleasanter conditions be absent and their
contraries present, it shall remain, still, intact.
7. Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled
by the man established in happiness?
Here is our answer:
These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle
towards the Sage's felicity: but they do serve towards the integrity of
his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being
or complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can be so easily
deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that holds the highest
good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time,
something which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does
yet take place by its side.
In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of
fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest
lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would
be veering or falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring
him down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No: a thousand
mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in
the tranquil possession of the Term.
But, they cry, great disasters, not the petty daily chances!
What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who
has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to
anything below?
If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no
great matter -- kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples,
colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own
handiwork -- how can he take any great account of the vacillations of
power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such
event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very
strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones,
or . . . Zeus . . . by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage,
whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life
in the body.
But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?
Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?
But if he go unburied?
Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always
rot.
But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an
unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?
The littleness of it!
But if he falls into his enemies' hands, into prison?
There is always the way towards escape, if none towards well-being.
But if his nearest be taken from him, his sons and daughters dragged
away to captivity?
What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong? Could
he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that nothing of all
this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that it
is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he
cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur? In the
knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; so, too, when the evil
has come about.
He would reflect that the nature of this All is such as brings these
things to pass and man must bow the head.
Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage; and
those that suffer have their freedom in their hands: if they stay,
either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real
grievance, or they stay against reason, when they should not, and then
they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of his
neighbours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil: his state
cannot hang upon the fortunes good or bad of any other men.
8. As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well
as he can; if they overpass his endurance they will carry him off.
And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in
the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when
fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.
But what if he be put beyond himself? What if pain grow so intense and
so torture him that the agony all but kills? Well, when he is put to
torture he will plan what is to be done: he retains his freedom of
action.
Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently
from the average man; neither ordinary experiences nor pains and
sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold.
To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.
And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to
hear of miseries, gain to die before they come: this is not concern for
others' welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our
imperfection: we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease
to tremble over what perhaps may be.
Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over misfortune
to our household must learn that this is not so with all, and that,
precisely, it is virtue's use to raise the general level of nature
towards the better and finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is
to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.
We cannot be indolent: this is an arena for the powerful combatant
holding his ground against the blows of fortune, and knowing that, sore
though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing
dreadful, nursery terrors.
So, the Sage would have desired misfortune?
It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the
virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable
soul.
9. But when he is out of himself, reason quenched by sickness or by
magic arts?
If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber,
he remains a Sage, why should he not equally remain happy? No one rules
him out of felicity in the hours of sleep; no one counts up that time
and so denies that he has been happy all his life.
If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then
they are no longer reasoning about the Sage: but we do suppose a Sage,
and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the
state of felicity.
"Well, a Sage let him remain," they say, "still, having no sensation
and not expressing his virtue in act, how can he be happy?"
But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy: a
man may not be aware of his personal attraction, but he remains
handsome none the less: if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be
any the less wise?
It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential
to wisdom and that happiness is only wisdom brought to act.
Now, this argument might have weight if prudence, wisdom, were
something fetched in from outside: but this is not so: wisdom is, in
its essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or rather is The
Authentic-Existent -- and this Existent does not perish in one asleep
or, to take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of his
mind: the Act of this Existent is continuous within him; and is a
sleepless activity: the Sage, therefore, even unconscious, is still the
Sage in Act.
This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one
part of him: we have here a parallel to what happens in the activity of
the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the
sensitive faculty to the rest of the man: if our physical life really
constituted the "We," its Act would be our Act: but, in the fact, this
physical life is not the "We"; the "We" is the activity of the
Intellectual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in Act we are
in Act.
10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is
that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action
upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through
the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there
not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the
soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any
perception? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical,
this "Earlier-than-perception" must be a thing having Act.
Let us explain the conditions under which we become conscious of this
Intellective-Act.
When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it]
which contains [or, corresponds to] the life of the Soul, is, so to
speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the
smooth and shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the
mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent
or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still
exists; so in the case of the Soul; when there is peace in that within
us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and
Intellectual-Principles these images appear. Then, side by side with
the primal knowledge of the activity of the Rational and the
Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a sense-perception of
their operation.
When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some
disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the
Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by
imagination.
In sum we may safely gather that while the Intellective-Act may be
attended by the Imaging Principle, it is not to be confounded with it.
And even in our conscious life we can point to many noble activities,
of mind and of hand alike, which at the time in no way compel our
consciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is most
intent: in a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave
action or of the fact that all that is done conforms to the rules of
courage. And so in cases beyond number.
So that it would even seem that consciousness tends to blunt the
activities upon which it is exercised, and that in the degree in which
these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more
vitality, and that, consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has
the truer fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but
gathered closely within itself.
11. We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer
alive: we answer that these people show themselves equally unable to
understand his inner life and his happiness.
If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a
living Sage and, under these terms, to enquire whether the man is in
happiness: they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he
has the happy life; they must not take away man and then look for the
happiness of a man: once they allow that the Sage lives within, they
must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the
outer world for the object of his desires. To consider the outer world
to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any good
external, would be to deny Substantial-Existence to happiness; for the
Sage would like to see all men prosperous and no evil befalling anyone;
but though it prove otherwise, he is still content.
If it be admitted that such a desire would be against reason, since
evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape from agreeing with us that
the Sage's will is set always and only inward.
12. The pleasure demanded for the life cannot be in the enjoyments of
the licentious or in any gratifications of the body -- there is no
place for these, and they stifle happiness -- nor in any violent
emotions -- what could so move the Sage? -- it can be only such
pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise
from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is
immediately present to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself: his
pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable.
Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life ever untroubled: his
state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever of all that is known as
evil can set it awry -- given only that he is and remains a Sage.
If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure in the life of the
Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is looking for.
13. The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but
merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine, and perhaps all the
finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular
cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without
searching and thinking, but the one greatest principle is ever present
to him, like a part of his being -- most of all present, should he be
even a victim in the much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite
all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an agreeable
lodging; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the
torture; in the Sage there is something else as well, The Self-Gathered
which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can
never be robbed of the vision of the All-Good.
14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and
body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain
its nominal goods.
It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the
living-body: happiness is the possession of the good of life: it is
centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul -- and not of all the
Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative
soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the body.
A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of
temperament, these surely do not make felicity; in the excess of these
advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and
forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of
counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest: the body
must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the
man behind the appearances.
Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt
to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still there can
be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours
could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if
it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he
has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work
down or wear away by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will
lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish
to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if
such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to
know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will
desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire
nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to
know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit
against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and
ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will
their contraries destroy or lessen it.
When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the
negative take away?
15. But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is
supposed to be naturally welcome, while the other meets only with the
very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal happiness?
We do, if they are equally wise.
What though the one be favoured in body and in all else that does not
help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards the vision of
the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to?
The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself
that he is more truly happy than the man without them: the utmost
profusion of such boons would not help even to make a flute-player.
We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness; we count alarming
and grave what his felicity takes lightly: he would be neither wise nor
in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such
things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his
own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a spirit he
can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not
perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half-thing.
As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by
surprise, while his thoughts perhaps are elsewhere, the Sage will
attack it and drive it out; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory
child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion,
as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity.
This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh: it is to himself and
in his own great concern that he is the Sage: giving freely to his
intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his
very union with the Intellectual-Principle.
16. Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm
but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for him, have
substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether;
they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of
mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But
admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be
deserved to be called a life of happiness; it misses the Great, both in
the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true
happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he
who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the
Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by
That.
He can care for no other Term than That: all else he will attend to
only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of any
increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention
to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there.
He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible,
but he himself remains a member of another order, not prevented from
abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at nature's hour, he
himself always the master to decide in its regard.
Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul's
satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Term's sake and not
for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which
he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as
it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will
give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no
lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at his side while he
sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument
was given him in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many
a time.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
HAPPINESS AND EXTENSION OF TIME.
1. Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time,
Happiness which is always taken as a present thing?
The memory of former felicity may surely be ruled out of count, for
Happiness is not a thing of words, but a definite condition which must
be actually present like the very fact and act of life.
2. It may be objected that our will towards living and towards
expressive activity is constant, and that each attainment of such
expression is an increase in Happiness.
But in the first place, by this reckoning every to-morrow's well-being
will be greater than to-day's, every later instalment successively
larger that an earlier; at once time supplants moral excellence as the
measure of felicity.
Then again the Gods to-day must be happier than of old: and their
bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be perfect. Further, when the
will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present: the
quest is always for something to be actually present until a standing
felicity is definitely achieved. The will to life which is will to
Existence aims at something present, since Existence must be a stably
present thing. Even when the act of the will is directed towards the
future, and the furthest future, its object is an actually present
having and being: there is no concern about what is passed or to come:
the future state a man seeks is to be a now to him; he does not care
about the forever: he asks that an actual present be actually present.
3. Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long time, if that present
spectacle has been a longer time before the eyes?
If in the greater length of time the man has seen more deeply, time has
certainly done something for him, but if all the process has brought
him no further vision, then one glance would give all he has had.
4. Still the one life has known pleasure longer than the other?
But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness -- unless
indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered Act [of the true man], in
which case this pleasure is simply our "Happiness." And even pleasure,
though it exist continuously, has never anything but the present; its
past is over and done with.
5. We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man
has been happy from first to last, another only at the last, and a
third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are equal?
This is straying from the question: we were comparing the happy among
themselves: now we are asked to compare the not-happy at the time when
they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of happiness.
If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of
happiness against men without it and their advantage is always by
something in the present.
6. Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an
increase of his unhappiness? Do not all troubles -- long-lasting pains,
sorrows, and everything of that type -- yield a greater sum of misery
in the longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time
why should not time equally augment happiness when all is well?
In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for
saying that time brings increase: for example, in a lingering malady
the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought
lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the
mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but
that of the present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of
unhappiness except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually
existing state -- in the sense that, the evil in the sufferer's
condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has
gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to the aggravation
of the malady not to the extension of time.
It may be pointed out also that this greater length of time is not a
thing existent at any given moment; and surely a "more" is not to be
made out by adding to something actually present something that has
passed away.
No: true happiness is not vague and fluid: it is an unchanging state.
If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it
is in the sense that a greater happiness is the reward of a higher
virtue: this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years of
its continuance; it is simply noting the high-water mark once for all
attained.
7. But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the
past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the case of time
itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the
present and call the total greater? Why not suppose a quantity of
happiness equivalent to a quantity of time? This would be no more than
taking it lap by lap to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing
to consider it as an indivisible, measurable only by the content of a
given instant.
There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be:
we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we might count the
dead: but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as
outweighing present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must
be an achieved and existent state, whereas any time over and apart from
the present is nonexistent: all progress of time means the extinction
of all the time that has been.
Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks to
break up in its fragmentary flight the permanence of its exemplar. Thus
whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands permanent in
eternity is annihilated -- saved only in so far as in some degree it
still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed if it be unreservedly
absorbed into time.
If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it clearly has
to do with the life of Authentic-Existence for that life is the Best.
Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time but by
eternity; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any
magnitude but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.
We must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and eternity, not
even everlasting time with the eternal; we cannot make laps and stages
of an absolute unity; all must be taken together, wheresoever and
howsoever we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not even as an
undivided block of time but as the Life of Eternity, a stretch not made
up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.
8. It may be urged that the actual presence of past experiences, kept
present by Memory, gives the advantage to the man of the longer
felicity.
But, Memory of what sort of experiences?
Memory either of formerly attained wisdom and virtue -- in which case
we have a better man and the argument from memory is given up -- or
memory of past pleasures, as if the man that has arrived at felicity
must roam far and wide in search of gratifications and is not contented
by the bliss actually within him.
And what is there pleasant in the memory of pleasure? What is it to
recall yesterday's excellent dinner? Still more ridiculous, one of ten
years ago. So, too, of last year's morality.
9. But is there not something to be said for the memory of the various
forms of beauty?
That is the resource of a man whose life is without beauty in the
present, so that, for lack of it now, he grasps at the memory of what
has been.
10. But, it may be said, length of time produces an abundance of good
actions missed by the man whose attainment of the happy state is recent
-- if indeed we can think at all of a state of happiness where good
actions have been few.
Now to make multiplicity, whether in time or in action, essential to
Happiness is to put it together by combining non-existents, represented
by the past, with some one thing that actually is. This consideration
it was that led us at the very beginning to place Happiness in the
actually existent and on that basis to launch our enquiry as to whether
the higher degree was determined by the longer time. It might be
thought that the Happiness of longer date must surpass the shorter by
virtue of the greater number of acts it included.
But, to begin with, men quite outside of the active life may attain the
state of felicity, and not in a less but in a greater degree than men
of affairs.
Secondly, the good does not derive from the act itself but from the
inner disposition which prompts the noble conduct: the wise and good
man in his very action harvests the good not by what he does but by
what he is.
A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the country, and the good of
the act is for all alike, no matter whose was the saving hand. The
contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and events: it
is his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and whatever
pleasure may accompany it.
To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside
virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul's expression is not in action
but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this,
this alone, is Happiness.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
BEAUTY.
1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for
the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds
of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift
themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of
beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the
pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What
loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.
What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the
ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the
beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?
Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is
there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless?
Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be?
Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious
not by anything inherent but by something communicated, while others
are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue. The same bodies
appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal
between being body and being beautiful.
What, then, is this something that shows itself in certain material
forms? This is the natural beginning of our enquiry.
What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object
is presented, and calls them, lures them, towards it, and fills them
with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of this, we have at once
a standpoint for the wider survey.
Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other
and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour,
constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things,
as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially
symmetrical, patterned.
But think what this means.
Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and
only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves,
but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an
aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of
ugliness; its law must run throughout.
All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being
devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of
the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And
lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?
In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole
noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself.
Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair
and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than
symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?
Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of
thought; are we to call in symmetry here? What symmetry is to be found
in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit?
What symmetry can there be in points of abstract thought?
The symmetry of being accordant with each other? But there may be
accordance or entire identity where there is nothing but ugliness: the
proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the
most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness
of will; the accordance is complete.
Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty
authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry enter here?
The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue
cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of
measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the
soul's faculties or purposes?
Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the
Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary?
2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the
Principle that bestows beauty on material things.
Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at
the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient
knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.
But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within
itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting
it.
Our interpretation is that the soul -- by the very truth of its nature,
by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being
-- when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship,
thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus
stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.
But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world
and the splendours in the Supreme? Such a likeness in the particulars
would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common between
beauty here and beauty There?
We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in
Ideal-Form.
All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it
remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from
the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is
something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by
Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to
Ideal-Form.
But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated
what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied
confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious
coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to
unity as far as multiplicity may.
And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself,
giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some
natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that
whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by
craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which
some natural quality may give to a single stone. This, then, is how the
material thing becomes beautiful -- by communicating in the thought
that flows from the Divine.
3. And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty --
one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt
whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.
Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful
where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself,
using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.
But what accordance is there between the material and that which
antedates all Matter?
On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing
before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it
beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is
the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the
indivisible exhibited in diversity?
So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the
Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in
nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some
shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still
remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a
thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something
concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that
of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue
consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul.
The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives
from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the
pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and
an Ideal-Form.
Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies,
holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever
upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to
the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others
penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has
colour primally; they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the
splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all
that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains
outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of
colour.
And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake
the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in
another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary
but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter
and bring pattern into being.
Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense, images and
shadow-pictures, fugitives that have entered into Matter -- to adorn,
and to ravish, where they are seen.
4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties than these. In the
sense-bound life we are no longer granted to know them, but the soul,
taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the vision
of these we must mount, leaving sense to its own low place.
As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material
world who have never seen them or known their grace -- men born blind,
let us suppose -- in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty
of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never
cared for such things, nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue
who have never known the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful
beyond the beauty of Evening and of dawn.
Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight -- and at
the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a
trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are
moving in the realm of Truth.
This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a
delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all
delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this
the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more
deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love -- just as all
take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as
sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.
5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be
made to declare themselves.
What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in
manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in
the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful
within, what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac exultation that
thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul,
this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the
veritable self?
These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of love.
But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no
grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon
no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other
hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or
admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life;
disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that
goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all,
the light of god-like Intellection.
All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but
what entitles them to be called beautiful?
They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them must
admit that they have reality of Being; and is not Real-Being, really
beautiful?
But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought
the Soul to loveliness: what is this grace, this splendour as of Light,
resting upon all the virtues?
Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that
against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and
how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before
us.
Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with
all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its
cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little
thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all
its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to
bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity.
What must we think but that all this shame is something that has
gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so
that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean
activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering
dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no
longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own
being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark?
An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the
call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body,
occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its
commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature
its own essential Idea.
If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native
comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing
him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted him,
and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and
purify himself and make himself what he was.
So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly -- by something foisted upon
it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body,
into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean
and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if
these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from
all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul; let it be
but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with
the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that
embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again
-- in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is
stripped away.
6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and
every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification.
Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the
unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the unclean loves
filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their joy in
foulness.
What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the
pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy
of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which
is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can
dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but
disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the
Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the
Soul to the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body,
intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring
of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to
all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection
are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for
only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the
Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God,
for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is
the Principle contrary to Existence: and the Ugly is also the primal
evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good
and Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us the
Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.
And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The
First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle
which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the
Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a
lower order-actions and pursuits for instance -- comes by operation of
the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the
world of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of
the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all
things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.
7. Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of
every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say
that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good.
To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set
all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we
have put on in our descent: -- so, to those that approach the Holy
Celebrations of the Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and
the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in
nakedness -- until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than
the God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that
solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that
from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act and
know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.
And one that shall know this vision -- with what passion of love shall
he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten
into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen
this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known
must love and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with
awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a
veritable love, with sharp desire; all other loves than this he must
despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair.
This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the
manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old
delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think
of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no
accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens
-- so perfect Its purity -- far above all such things in that they are
non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This?
Beholding this Being -- the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent
that ever gives forth and never takes -- resting, rapt, in the vision
and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what
Beauty can the soul yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the
absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them
also worthy of love.
And for This, the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before the
Souls; all our labour is for This, lest we be left without part in this
noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight,
which to fail of is to fail utterly.
For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in visible
forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of kingdom has
failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose winning he
should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if
only, spurning the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining
to This, he may see.
8. But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the
inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart
from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?
He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself,
foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the
material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes
of grace that show in body, let him not pursue: he must know them for
copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of.
For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water
-- is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank
into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness? So
too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall
be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths
loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the
Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here.
"Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland": this is the soundest
counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For
Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the
sorceries of Circe or Calypso -- not content to linger for all the
pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his
days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The
Father.
What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a
journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor
need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of
things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes
and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a
vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.
9. And this inner vision, what is its operation?
Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour.
Therefore the Soul must be trained -- to the habit of remarking, first,
all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour
of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly,
you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful
forms.
But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness?
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself
beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made
beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line
lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.
So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is
crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one
glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there
shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until
you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless
shrine.
When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are
self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that
can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the
authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential
nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by
space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a
thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all
measure and more than all quantity -- when you perceive that you have
grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your
confidence, strike forward yet a step -- you need a guide no longer --
strain, and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that
adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in
its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees
nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before
it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen,
and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had
first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First
Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares
to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the
Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the
Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty.
For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and
essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the
Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating
Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the
first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of
Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good,
which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the
Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and,
thus, always, Beauty's seat is There.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
ON THE PRIMAL GOOD AND SECONDARY FORMS OF GOOD
[OTHERWISE, "ON HAPPINESS"].
1. We can scarcely conceive that for any entity the Good can be other
than the natural Act expressing its life-force, or in the case of an
entity made up of parts the Act, appropriate, natural and complete,
expressive of that in it which is best.
For the Soul, then, the Good is its own natural Act.
But the Soul itself is natively a "Best"; if, further, its act be
directed towards the Best, the achievement is not merely the "Soul's
good" but "The Good" without qualification.
Now, given an Existent which -- as being itself the best of existences
and even transcending the existences -- directs its Act towards no
other, but is the object to which the Act of all else is directed, it
is clear that this must be at once the Good and the means through which
all else may participate in Good.
This Absolute Good other entities may possess in two ways -- by
becoming like to It and by directing the Act of their being towards It.
Now, if all aspiration and Act whatsoever are directed towards the
Good, it follows that the Essential-Good neither need nor can look
outside itself or aspire to anything other than itself: it can but
remain unmoved, as being, in the constitution of things, the wellspring
and first-cause of all Act: whatsoever in other entities is of the
nature of Good cannot be due to any Act of the Essential-Good upon
them; it is for them on the contrary to act towards their source and
cause. The Good must, then, be the Good not by any Act, not even by
virtue of its Intellection, but by its very rest within Itself.
Existing beyond and above Being, it must be beyond and above the
Intellectual-Principle and all Intellection.
For, again, that only can be named the Good to which all is bound and
itself to none: for only thus is it veritably the object of all
aspiration. It must be unmoved, while all circles around it, as a
circumference around a centre from which all the radii proceed. Another
example would be the sun, central to the light which streams from it
and is yet linked to it, or at least is always about it, irremoveably;
try all you will to separate the light from the sun, or the sun from
its light, for ever the light is in the sun.
2. But the Universe outside; how is it aligned towards the Good?
The soulless by direction toward Soul: Soul towards the Good itself,
through the Intellectual-Principle.
Everything has something of the Good, by virtue of possessing a certain
degree of unity and a certain degree of Existence and by participation
in Ideal-Form: to the extent of the Unity, Being, and Form which are
present, there is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and Existence in
which there is participation are no more than images of the Ideal-Form.
With Soul it is different; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the
Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and
through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually
possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the
Intellectual-Principle, since this follows immediately upon the Good.
In sum, then, life is the Good to the living, and the
Intellectual-Principle to what is intellective; so that
where there is life with intellection there is a double contact with
the Good.
3. But if life is a good, is there good for all that lives?
No: in the vile, life limps: it is like the eye to the dim-sighted; it
fails of its task.
But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil,
still in the total a good, must not death be an evil?
Evil to What? There must be a subject for the evil: but if the possible
subject is no longer among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid of
life . . . why, a stone is not more immune.
If, on the contrary, after death life and soul continue, then death
will be no evil but a good; Soul, disembodied, is the freer to ply its
own Act.
If it be taken into the All-Soul -- what evil can reach it There? And
as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil -- so,
certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And
if it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its
death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower
world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death; the
misfortune is still life, a life of a definite character.
Life is a partnership of a Soul and body; death is the dissolution; in
either life or death, then, the Soul will feel itself at home.
But, again, if life is good, how can death be anything but evil?
Remember that the good of life, where it has any good at all, is not
due to anything in the partnership but to the repelling of evil by
virtue; death, then, must be the greater good.
In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the Soul enters
its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but
holding itself apart, even here.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
ON THE NATURE AND SOURCE OF EVIL.
1. Those enquiring whence Evil enters into beings, or rather into a
certain order of beings, would be making the best beginning if they
established, first of all, what precisely Evil is, what constitutes its
Nature. At once we should know whence it comes, where it has its native
seat and where it is present merely as an accident; and there would be
no further question as to whether it has Authentic-Existence.
But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us could we possibly know
Evil?
All knowing comes by likeness. The Intellectual-Principle and the Soul,
being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms and would have a natural
tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form,
seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good?
If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and
that as Evil is the contrary to Good the one act would grasp Good and
Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear perception
and understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the
baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good hold no such standing,
are nearer to Non-Being.
No doubt there is a question in what precise way Good is contrary to
Evil -- whether it is as First-Principle to last of things or as
Ideal-Form to utter Lack: but this subject we postpone.
2. For the moment let us define the nature of the Good as far as the
immediate purpose demands.
The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all
Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while Itself is
without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure
and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and
Existence and Soul and Life and all Intellective-Act.
All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The Good is
beyond-beautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in the
Intellectual-Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly
unlike what is known as Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is
nourished on the propositions of logic, is skilled in following
discussions, works by reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and
comes to know the world of Being also by the steps of logical process,
having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining empty, all Intelligence
though it be, until it has put itself to school.
The Intellectual-Principle we are discussing is not of such a kind: It
possesses all: It is all: It is present to all by Its self-presence: It
has all by other means than having, for what It possesses is still
Itself, nor does any particular of all within It stand apart; for every
such particular is the whole and in all respects all, while yet not
confused in the mass but still distinct, apart to the extent that any
participant in the Intellectual-Principle participates not in the
entire as one thing but in whatsoever lies within its own reach.
And the First Act is the Act of The Good stationary within Itself, and
the First Existence is the self-contained Existence of The Good; but
there is also an Act upon It, that of the Intellectual-Principle which,
as it were, lives about It.
And the Soul, outside, circles around the Intellectual-Principle, and
by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It, through It sees God.
Such is the untroubled, the blissful, life of divine beings, and Evil
has no place in it; if this were all, there would be no Evil but Good
only, the first, the second and the third Good. All, thus far, is with
the King of All, unfailing Cause of Good and Beauty and controller of
all; and what is Good in the second degree depends upon the
Second-Principle and tertiary Good upon the Third.
3. If such be the Nature of Beings and of That which transcends all the
realm of Being, Evil cannot have place among Beings or in the
Beyond-Being; these are good.
There remains, only, if Evil exist at all, that it be situate in the
realm of Non-Being, that it be some mode, as it were, of the Non-Being,
that it have its seat in something in touch with Non-Being or to a
certain degree communicate in Non-Being.
By this Non-Being, of course, we are not to understand something that
simply does not exist, but only something of an utterly different order
from Authentic-Being: there is no question here of movement or position
with regard to Being; the Non-Being we are thinking of is, rather, an
image of Being or perhaps something still further removed than even an
image.
Now this [the required faint image of Being] might be the sensible
universe with all the impressions it engenders, or it might be
something of even later derivation, accidental to the realm of sense,
or again, it might be the source of the sense-world or something of the
same order entering into it to complete it.
Some conception of it would be reached by thinking of measurelessness
as opposed to measure, of the unbounded against bound, the unshaped
against a principle of shape, the ever-needy against the
self-sufficing: think of the ever-undefined, the never at rest, the
all-accepting but never sated, utter dearth; and make all this
character not mere accident in it but its equivalent for
essential-being, so that, whatsoever fragment of it be taken, that part
is all lawless void, while whatever participates in it and resembles it
becomes evil, though not of course to the point of being, as itself is,
Evil-Absolute.
In what substantial-form [hypostasis] then is all this to be found --
not as accident but as the very substance itself?
For if Evil can enter into other things, it must have in a certain
sense a prior existence, even though it may not be an essence. As there
is Good, the Absolute, as well as Good, the quality, so, together with
the derived evil entering into something not itself, there must be the
Absolute Evil.
But how? Can there be Unmeasure apart from an unmeasured object?
Does not Measure exist apart from unmeasured things? Precisely as there
is Measure apart from anything measured, so there is Unmeasure apart
from the unmeasured. If Unmeasure could not exist independently, it
must exist either in an unmeasured object or in something measured; but
the unmeasured could not need Unmeasure and the measured could not
contain it.
There must, then, be some Undetermination-Absolute, some Absolute
Formlessness; all the qualities cited as characterizing the Nature of
Evil must be summed under an Absolute Evil; and every evil thing
outside of this must either contain this Absolute by saturation or have
taken the character of evil and become a cause of evil by consecration
to this Absolute.
What will this be?
That Kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes,
measurements and limits, that which has no trace of good by any title
of its own, but [at best] takes order and grace from some Principle
outside itself, a mere image as regards Absolute-Being but the
Authentic Essence of Evil -- in so far as Evil can have Authentic
Being. In such a Kind, Reason recognizes the Primal Evil, Evil
Absolute.
4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing.
What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by
their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other;
they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless
flux they are always slipping away from Being.
Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an evil
Kind.
What, then, is the evil Soul?
It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in
which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the
unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil -- unmeasure, excess and
shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other
flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which
set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or
evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike.
But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought under
the causing principle indicated?
Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself.
That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the
Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is
merged into a body made of Matter.
Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the Soul's seeing is
baulked by the passions and by the darkening that Matter brings to it,
by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence
but to Process -- whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind
so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in
it but merely looks towards it.
For, wholly without part in Good, the negation of Good, unmingled Lack,
this Matter-Kind makes over to its own likeness whatsoever comes in
touch with it.
The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the
Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away from
Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is
evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures in its purity, only,
and wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle.
The Soul that breaks away from this source of its reality to the
non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an image, to
the loyal Soul. By its falling-away -- and to the extent of the fall --
it is stripped of Determination, becomes wholly indeterminate, sees
darkness. Looking to what repels vision, as we look when we are said to
see darkness, it has taken Matter into itself.
5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the
darkness is due to the lack of good, the Soul's evil has its source in
that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause -- and at
once the Principle of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to
Matter.
No: Evil is not in any and every lack; it is in absolute lack. What
falls in some degree short of the Good is not Evil; considered in its
own kind it might even be perfect, but where there is utter dearth,
there we have Essential Evil, void of all share in Good; this is the
case with Matter.
Matter has not even existence whereby to have some part in Good: Being
is attributed to it by an accident of words: the truth would be that it
has Non-Being.
Mere lack brings merely Not-Goodness: Evil demands the absolute lack --
though, of course, any very considerable shortcoming makes the ultimate
fall possible and is already, in itself, an evil.
In fine we are not to think of Evil as some particular bad thing --
injustice, for example, or any other ugly trait -- but as a principle
distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition of
certain elements, it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in
the Soul; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be
determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the Soul that
operate and by the nature of their operation, whether seeing, acting,
or merely admitting impression.
But supposing things external to the Soul are to be counted Evil --
sickness, poverty and so forth -- how can they be referred to the
principle we have described?
Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material
organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but matter not
mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods
made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature
is to be one long want.
If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves, the source of Evil, we
are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we came to be; the Evil
which holds men down binds them against their will; and for those that
have the strength -- not found in all men, it is true -- there is a
deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in the soul.
In a word since Matter belongs only to the sensible world, vice in men
is not the Absolute Evil; not all men are vicious; some overcome vice,
some, the better sort, are never attacked by it; and those who master
it win by means of that in them which is not material.
6. If this be so, how do we explain the teaching that evils can never
pass away but "exist of necessity," that "while evil has no place in
the divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this place for ever"?
Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil, ever moving its orderly
way, spinning on the appointed path, no injustice There or any flaw, no
wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the settled plan,
while injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as "the
Mortal Kind and this Place"?
Not quite so: for the precept to "flee hence" does not refer to earth
and earthly life. The flight we read of consists not in quitting earth
but in living our earth-life "with justice and piety in the light of
philosophy"; it is vice we are to flee, so that clearly to the writer
Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when the disputant in
that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the doctrine
advanced, there would be an end of Evil, he is answered, "That can
never be: Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good."
Still we may reasonably ask how can vice in man be a contrary to The
Good in the Supernal: for vice is the contrary to virtue and virtue is
not The Good but merely the good thing by which Matter is brought to
order.
How can there any contrary to the Absolute Good, when the absolute has
no quality?
Besides, is there any universal necessity that the existence of one of
two contraries should entail the existence of the other? Admit that the
existence of one is often accompanied by the existence of the other --
sickness and health, for example -- yet there is no universal
compulsion.
Perhaps, however, our author did not mean that this was universally
true; he is speaking only of The Good.
But then, if The Good is an essence, and still more, if It is that
which transcends all existence, how can It have any contrary?
That there is nothing contrary to essence is certain in the case of
particular existences -- established by practical proof -- but not in
the quite different case of the Universal.
But of what nature would this contrary be, the contrary to universal
existence and in general to the Primals?
To essential existence would be opposed the non-existence; to the
nature of Good, some principle and source of evil. Both these will be
sources, the one of what is good, the other of what is evil; and all
within the domain of the one principle is opposed, as contrary, to the
entire domain of the other, and this in a contrariety more violent than
any existing between secondary things.
For these last are opposed as members of one species or of one genus,
and, within that common ground, they participate in some common
quality.
In the case of the Primals or Universals there is such complete
separation that what is the exact negation of one group constitutes the
very nature of the other; we have diametric contrariety if by
contrariety we mean the extreme of remoteness.
Now to the content of the divine order, the fixed quality, the
measuredness and so forth -- there is opposed the content of the evil
principle, its unfixedness, measurelessness and so forth: total is
opposed to total. The existence of the one genus is a falsity,
primarily, essentially, a falseness: the other genus has
Essence-Authentic: the opposition is of truth to lie; essence is
opposed to essence.
Thus we see that it is not universally true that an Essence can have no
contrary.
In the case of fire and water we would admit contrariety if it were not
for their common element, the Matter, about which are gathered the
warmth and dryness of one and the dampness and cold of the other: if
there were only present what constitutes their distinct kinds, the
common ground being absent, there would be, here also, essence contrary
to essence.
In sum, things utterly sundered, having nothing in common, standing at
the remotest poles, are opposites in nature: the contrariety does not
depend upon quality or upon the existence of a distinct genus of
beings, but upon the utmost difference, clash in content, clash in
effect.
7. But why does the existence of the Principle of Good necessarily
comport the existence of a Principle of Evil? Is it because the All
necessarily comports the existence of Matter? Yes: for necessarily this
All is made up of contraries: it could not exist if Matter did not. The
Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the
Intellectual-Principle and Necessity: what comes into it from God is
good; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying
Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form.
But, since the expression "this place" must be taken to mean the All,
how explain the words "mortal nature"?
The answer is in the passage [in which the Father of Gods addresses the
Divinities of the lower sphere], "Since you possess only a derivative
being, you are not immortals . . . but by my power you shall escape
dissolution."
The escape, we read, is not a matter of place, but of acquiring virtue,
of disengaging the self from the body; this is the escape from Matter.
Plato explains somewhere how a man frees himself and how he remains
bound; and the phrase "to live among the gods" means to live among the
Intelligible-Existents, for these are the Immortals.
There is another consideration establishing the necessary existence of
Evil.
Given that The Good is not the only existent thing, it is inevitable
that, by the outgoing from it or, if the phrase be preferred, the
continuous down-going or away-going from it, there should be produced a
Last, something after which nothing more can be produced: this will be
Evil.
As necessarily as there is Something after the First, so necessarily
there is a Last: this Last is Matter, the thing which has no residue of
good in it: here is the necessity of Evil.
8. But there will still be some to deny that it is through this Matter
that we ourselves become evil.
They will say that neither ignorance nor wicked desires arise in
Matter. Even if they admit that the unhappy condition within us is due
to the pravity inherent in body, they will urge that still the blame
lies not in the Matter itself but with the Form present in it -- such
Form as heat, cold, bitterness, saltness and all other conditions
perceptible to sense, or again such states as being full or void -- not
in the concrete signification but in the presence or absence of just
such forms. In a word, they will argue, all particularity in desires
and even in perverted judgements upon things, can be referred to such
causes, so that Evil lies in this Form much more than in the mere
Matter.
Yet, even with all this, they can be compelled to admit that Matter is
the Evil.
For, the quality [form] that has entered into Matter does not act as an
entity apart from the Matter, any more than axe-shape will cut apart
from iron. Further, Forms lodged in Matter are not the same as they
would be if they remained within themselves; they are Reason-Principles
Materialized, they are corrupted in the Matter, they have absorbed its
nature: essential fire does not burn, nor do any of the essential
entities effect, of themselves alone, the operation which, once they
have entered into Matter, is traced to their action.
Matter becomes mistress of what is manifested through it: it corrupts
and destroys the incomer, it substitutes its own opposite character and
kind, not in the sense of opposing, for example, concrete cold to
concrete warmth, but by setting its own formlessness against the Form
of heat, shapelessness to shape, excess and defect to the duly ordered.
Thus, in sum, what enters into Matter ceases to belong to itself, comes
to belong to Matter, just as, in the nourishment of living beings, what
is taken in does not remain as it came, but is turned into, say, dog's
blood and all that goes to make a dog, becomes, in fact, any of the
humours of any recipient.
No, if body is the cause of Evil, then there is no escape; the cause of
Evil is Matter.
Still, it will be urged, the incoming Idea should have been able to
conquer the Matter.
The difficulty is that Matter's master cannot remain pure itself except
by avoidance of Matter.
Besides, the constitution determines both the desires and their
violence so that there are bodies in which the incoming idea cannot
hold sway: there is a vicious constitution which chills and clogs the
activity and inhibits choice; a contrary bodily habit produces
frivolity, lack of balance. The same fact is indicated by our
successive variations of mood: in times of stress, we are not the same
either in desires or in ideas -- as when we are at peace, and we differ
again with every several object that brings us satisfaction.
To resume: the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by
resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil
secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal -- primarily, the
darkness; secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance and
a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential
Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The
Good, or participation in it.
9. But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil?
And first of the Evil of soul: Virtue, we may know by the
Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but Vice?
A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its
divergence from the line of Virtue.
But are we able to affirm Vice by any vision we can have of it, or is
there some other way of knowing it?
Utter viciousness, certainly not by any vision, for it is utterly
outside of bound and measure; this thing which is nowhere can be seized
only by abstraction; but any degree of evil falling short of The
Absolute is knowable by the extent of that falling short.
We see partial wrong; from what is before us we divine that which is
lacking to the entire form [or Kind] thus indicated; we see that the
completed Kind would be the Indeterminate; by this process we are able
to identify and affirm Evil. In the same way when we observe what we
feel to be an ugly appearance in Matter -- left there because the
Reason-Principle has not become so completely the master as to cover
over the unseemliness -- we recognise Ugliness by the falling-short
from Ideal-Form.
But how can we identify what has never had any touch of Form?
We utterly eliminate every kind of Form; and the object in which there
is none whatever we call Matter: if we are to see Matter we must so
completely abolish Form that we take shapelessness into our very
selves.
In fact it is another Intellectual-Principle, not the true, this which
ventures a vision so uncongenial.
To see darkness the eye withdraws from the light; it is striving to
cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the light which would make the
darkness invisible; away from the light its power is rather that of
not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is its nearest approach
to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its
contrary [Matter], must leave its own light locked up within itself,
and as it were go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must
ignore its native brightness and submit itself to the very
contradiction of its being.
10. But if Matter is devoid of quality how can it be evil?
It is described as being devoid of quality in the sense only that it
does not essentially possess any of the qualities which it admits and
which enter into it as into a substratum. No one says that it has no
nature; and if it has any nature at all, why may not that nature be
evil though not in the sense of quality?
Quality qualifies something not itself: it is therefore an accidental;
it resides in some other object. Matter does not exist in some other
object but is the substratum in which the accidental resides. Matter,
then, is said to be devoid of Quality in that it does not in itself
possess this thing which is by nature an accidental. If, moreover,
Quality itself be devoid of Quality, how can Matter, which is the
unqualified, be said to have it?
Thus, it is quite correct to say at once that Matter is without Quality
and that it is evil: it is Evil not in the sense of having Quality but,
precisely, in not having it; give it Quality and in its very Evil it
would almost be a Form, whereas in Truth it is a Kind contrary to Form.
"But," it may be said, "the Kind opposed to all Form is Privation or
Negation, and this necessarily refers to something other than itself,
it is no Substantial-Existence: therefore if Evil is Privation or
Negation it must be lodged in some Negation of Form: there will be no
Self-Existent Evil."
This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of
Evil in the Soul; the Evil, the Vice, will be a Negation and not
anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine which
denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek
elsewhere; we may at once place Evil in the Soul, recognising it as the
mere absence of Good. But if the negation is the negation of something
that ought to become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the
Soul, then the Soul produces vice within itself by the operation of its
own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, Soul though it be,
devoid of life: the Soul, if it has no life, is soulless; the Soul is
no Soul.
No; the Soul has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its
own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it has much good in it;
it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not
essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil
present in it even as an accidental, for the Soul is not wholly apart
from the Good.
Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be described not as an
entire, but as a partial, negation of good.
But if this were so, part of the Soul must possess The Good, part be
without it; the Soul will have a mingled nature and the Evil within it
will not be unblended: we have not yet lighted on the Primal, Unmingled
Evil. The Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the Evil as an
Accidental.
Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the Soul like something
affecting the eye and so hindering sight.
But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the
Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an
impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not
Evil-Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute Good, but a co-operator with
it; and if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the Absolute
Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good; neither,
therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil.
We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good and Beauty, because we
know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it
is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going
upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going
downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the
starting-point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is
possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it.
We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from
all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the
Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is
no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still
carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the
Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is
twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench
itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world
until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and
this is our "going down to Hades and slumbering there."
11. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the Soul.
We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along
from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong
to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure
imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or
nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.
Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the
Soul, whence it comes.
For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul: the word
weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of
resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy --
unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the
weakness is Matter.
But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we
call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the result of
any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything
like a disease, like a fever.
Now this weakness must be seated either in Souls utterly disengaged or
in Souls bound to Matter or in both.
It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for all these are pure and,
as we read, winged and perfect and unimpeded in their task: there
remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither cleansed
nor clean; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but
in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm or bile in the organs of
the body.
If we form an acute and accurate notion of the cause of the fall we
shall understand the weakness that comes by it.
Matter exists; Soul exists; and they occupy, so to speak, one place.
There is not one place for Matter and another for Soul-Matter, for
instance, kept to earth, Soul in the air: the soul's "separate place"
is simply its not being in Matter; that is, its not being united with
it; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of Soul and
Matter; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this
is the Soul's apartness.
But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its
intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears, importunes,
raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground is
holy, nothing there without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and
takes light: but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to,
for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil
of it makes it invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the light
streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with
Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it
enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand.
This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter: thence its
weakness: not all the faculties of its being retain free play, for
Matter hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon the Soul's
territory and, as it were, crushes the Soul back; and it turns to evil
all that it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again.
Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of Soul and of all its evil is
Matter.
The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the vice; it is Primal Evil.
Even though the Soul itself submits to Matter and engenders to it; if
it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is
still the presence of Matter: the Soul would never have approached
Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its
earth-life.
12. If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this
Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises "On Matter" where the
question is copiously treated.
To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away with the
Good as well, and even to deny the existence of anything desirable; it
is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual act; for desire has
Good for its object, aversion looks to Evil; all intellectual act, all
Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is itself one of the things that
are good.
There must then be The Good -- good unmixed -- and the Mingled Good and
Bad, and the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending with the Utterly
Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil constitutes the
lesser part tends, by that lessening, towards the Good.
What, then, must Evil be to the Soul?
What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind?
There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear: fear touches the
compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow are the
accompaniments of the dissolution; desires spring from something
troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble
threatened; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable
outside the Soul, accepted only because the Soul is not devoid of parts
or phases; the Soul takes up false notions through having gone outside
of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself.
One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this
condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle:
this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place
of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower.
Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good,
it is not Evil only: it appears, necessarily, bound around with bonds
of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and beneath
these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by
the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but
that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of
Images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance.
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
"THE REASONED DISMISSAL".
"You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth . . . " [taking
something with it].
For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its
going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be
completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds
itself free.
But how does the body come to be separated?
The separation takes place when nothing of Soul remains bound up with
it: the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the Soul was
retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest.
But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has
used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the Soul
slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion;
there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful
to indulge.
But if a man feel himself to be losing his reason?
That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should occur, it must be
classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the bidding of the fact
though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the
Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes.
And if there be a period allotted to all by fate, to anticipate the
hour could not be a happy act, unless, as we have indicated, under
stern necessity.
If everyone is to hold in the other world a standing determined by the
state in which he quitted this, there must be no withdrawal as long as
there is any hope of progress.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
THE SECOND ENNEAD
__________________________________________________________________
FIRST TRACTATE.
ON THE KOSMOS OR ON THE HEAVENLY SYSTEM.
1. We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed
for ever and will for ever endure: but simply to refer this perdurance
to the Will of God, however true an explanation, is utterly inadequate.
The elements of this sphere change; the living beings of earth pass
away; only the Ideal-form [the species] persists: possibly a similar
process obtains in the All.
The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of
body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new
substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to
the unity of idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no
more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the
celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular
entity?
Let us suppose this persistence to be the result of the
all-inclusiveness of the celestial and universal -- with its
consequence, the absence of any outlying matter into which change could
take place or which could break in and destroy.
This explanation would, no doubt, safeguard the integrity of the Whole,
of the All; but our sun and the individual being of the other heavenly
bodies would not on these terms be secured in perpetuity: they are
parts; no one of them is in itself the whole, the all; it would still
be probable that theirs is no more than that duration in form which
belongs to fire and such entities.
This would apply even to the entire ordered universe itself. For it is
very possible that this too, though not in process of destruction from
outside, might have only formal duration; its parts may be so wearing
each other down as to keep it in a continuous decay while, amid the
ceaseless flux of the Kind constituting its base, an outside power
ceaselessly restores the form: in this way the living All may lie under
the same conditions as man and horse and the rest man and horse
persisting but not the individual of the type.
With this, we would have no longer the distinction of one order, the
heavenly system, stable for ever, and another, the earthly, in process
of decay: all would be alike except in the point of time; the celestial
would merely be longer lasting. If, then, we accepted this duration of
type alone as a true account of the All equally with its partial
members, our difficulties would be eased -- or indeed we should have no
further problem -- once the Will of God were shown to be capable, under
these conditions and by such communication, of sustaining the Universe.
But if we are obliged to allow individual persistence to any definite
entity within the Kosmos then, firstly, we must show that the Divine
Will is adequate to make it so; secondly, we have to face the question,
What accounts for some things having individual persistence and others
only the persistence of type? and, thirdly, we ask how the partial
entities of the celestial system hold a real duration which would thus
appear possible to all partial things.
2. Supposing we accept this view and hold that, while things below the
moon's orb have merely type-persistence, the celestial realm and all
its several members possess individual eternity; it remains to show how
this strict permanence of the individual identity -- the actual item
eternally unchangeable -- can belong to what is certainly corporeal,
seeing that bodily substance is characteristically a thing of flux.
The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no less than by the other
philosophers who have dealt with physical matters, and is applied not
only to ordinary bodies but to those, also, of the heavenly sphere.
"How," he asks, "can these corporeal and visible entities continue
eternally unchanged in identity?" -- evidently agreeing, in this matter
also, with Herakleitos who maintained that even the sun is perpetually
coming anew into being. To Aristotle there would be no problem; it is
only accepting his theories of a fifth-substance.
But to those who reject Aristotle's Quintessence and hold the material
mass of the heavens to consist of the elements underlying the living
things of this sphere, how is individual permanence possible? And the
difficulty is still greater for the parts, for the sun and the heavenly
bodies.
Every living thing is a combination of soul and body-kind: the
celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an
individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these
constituents or of one of them, by the combination of soul and body or
by soul only or by body only.
Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the
desired permanence at once; no need, then, to call on a soul or on any
perdurable conjunction to account for the continued maintenance of a
living being.
But the case is different when one holds that body is, of itself,
perishable and that Soul is the principle of permanence: this view
obliges us to the proof that the character of body is not in itself
fatal either to the coherence or to the lasting stability which are
imperative: it must be shown that the two elements of the union
envisaged are not inevitably hostile, but that on the contrary [in the
heavens] even Matter must conduce to the scheme of the standing result.
3. We have to ask, that is, how Matter, this entity of ceaseless flux
constituting the physical mass of the universe, could serve towards the
immortality of the Kosmos.
And our answer is "Because the flux is not outgoing": where there is
motion within but not outwards and the total remains unchanged, there
is neither growth nor decline, and thus the Kosmos never ages.
We have a parallel in our earth, constant from eternity to pattern and
to mass; the air, too, never fails; and there is always water: all the
changes of these elements leave unchanged the Principle of the total
living thing, our world. In our own constitution, again, there is a
ceaseless shifting of particles -- and that with outgoing loss -- and
yet the individual persists for a long time: where there is no question
of an outside region, the body-principle cannot clash with soul as
against the identity and endless duration of the living thing.
Of these material elements -- for example -- fire, the keen and swift,
cooperates by its upward tendency as earth by its lingering below; for
we must not imagine that the fire, once it finds itself at the point
where its ascent must stop, settles down as in its appropriate place,
no longer seeking, like all the rest, to expand in both directions. No:
but higher is not possible; lower is repugnant to its Kind; all that
remains for it is to be tractable and, answering to a need of its
nature, to be drawn by the Soul to the activity of life, and so to move
to in a glorious place, in the Soul. Anyone that dreads its falling may
take heart; the circuit of the Soul provides against any declination,
embracing, sustaining; and since fire has of itself no downward
tendency it accepts that guiding without resistance. The partial
elements constituting our persons do not suffice for their own
cohesion; once they are brought to human shape, they must borrow
elsewhere if the organism is to be maintained: but in the upper spheres
since there can be no loss by flux no such replenishment is needed.
Suppose such loss, suppose fire extinguished there, then a new fire
must be kindled; so also if such loss by flux could occur in some of
the superiors from which the celestial fire depends, that too must be
replaced: but with such transmutations, while there might be something
continuously similar, there would be, no longer, a Living All abidingly
self-identical.
4. But matters are involved here which demand specific investigation
and cannot be treated as incidental merely to our present problem. We
are faced with several questions: Is the heavenly system exposed to any
such flux as would occasion the need of some restoration corresponding
to nourishment; or do its members, once set in their due places, suffer
no loss of substance, permanent by Kind? Does it consist of fire only,
or is it mainly of fire with the other elements, as well, taken up and
carried in the circuit by the dominant Principle?
Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the
firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul,
and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily
substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the
noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the
determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their
characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame
as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is
equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars.
Still, the great argument remains, the Soul, moving in its marvellous
might second only to the very loftiest Existents: how could anything
once placed within this Soul break away from it into non-being? No one
that understands this principle, the support of all things, can fail to
see that, sprung from God, it is a stronger stay than any bonds.
And is it conceivable that the Soul, valid to sustain for a certain
space of time, could not so sustain for ever? This would be to assume
that it holds things together by violence; that there is a "natural
course" at variance with what actually exists in the nature of the
universe and in these exquisitely ordered beings; and that there is
some power able to storm the established system and destroy its ordered
coherence, some kingdom or dominion that may shatter the order founded
by the Soul.
Further: The Kosmos has had no beginning -- the impossibility has been
shown elsewhere -- and this is warrant for its continued existence. Why
should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The
elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold
sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these
elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the
ground of all the change must itself be changeless.
As to any alteration of purpose in the Soul we have already shown the
emptiness of that fancy: the administration of the universe entails
neither labour nor loss; and, even supposing the possibility of
annihilating all that is material, the Soul would be no whit the better
or the worse.
5. But how explain the permanence There, while the content of this
sphere -- its elements and its living things alike -- are passing?
The reason is given by Plato: the celestial order is from God, the
living things of earth from the gods sprung from God; and it is law
that the offspring of God endures.
In other words, the celestial soul -- and our souls with it -- springs
directly next from the Creator, while the animal life of this earth is
produced by an image which goes forth from that celestial soul and may
be said to flow downwards from it.
A soul, then, of the minor degree -- reproducing, indeed, that of the
Divine sphere but lacking in power inasmuch as it must exercise its
creative act upon inferior stuff in an inferior region -- the
substances taken up into the fabric being of themselves repugnant to
duration; with such an origin the living things of this realm cannot be
of strength to last for ever; the material constituents are not as
firmly held and controlled as if they were ruled immediately by a
Principle of higher potency.
The heavens, on the contrary, must have persistence as a whole, and
this entails the persistence of the parts, of the stars they contain:
we could not imagine that whole to endure with the parts in flux --
though, of course, we must distinguish things sub-celestial from the
heavens themselves whose region does not in fact extend so low as to
the moon.
Our own case is different: physically we are formed by that [inferior]
soul, given forth [not directly from God but] from the divine beings in
the heavens and from the heavens themselves; it is by way of that
inferior soul that we are associated with the body [which therefore
will not be persistent]; for the higher soul which constitutes the We
is the principle not of our existence but of our excellence or, if also
of our existence, then only in the sense that, when the body is already
constituted, it enters, bringing with it some effluence from the Divine
Reason in support of the existence.
6. We may now consider the question whether fire is the sole element
existing in that celestial realm and whether there is any outgoing
thence with the consequent need of renewal.
Timaeus pronounced the material frame of the All to consist primarily
of earth and fire for visibility, earth for solidity -- and deduced
that the stars must be mainly composed of fire, but not solely since
there is no doubt they are solid.
And this is probably a true account. Plato accepts it as indicated by
all the appearances. And, in fact, to all our perception -- as we see
them and derive from them the impression of illumination -- the stars
appear to be mostly, if not exclusively, fire: but on reasoning into
the matter we judge that since solidity cannot exist apart from
earth-matter, they must contain earth as well.
But what place could there be for the other elements? It is impossible
to imagine water amid so vast a conflagration; and if air were present
it would be continually changing into fire.
Admitting [with Timaeus; as a logical truth] that two self-contained
entities, standing as extremes to each other need for their coherence
two intermediaries; we may still question whether this holds good with
regard to physical bodies. Certainly water and earth can be mixed
without any such intermediate. It might seem valid to object that the
intermediates are already present in the earth and the water; but a
possible answer would be, "Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is
necessary to the coherence of those extremes."
None the less we will take it that the coherence of extremes is
produced by virtue of each possessing all the intermediates. It is
still not proven that fire is necessary to the visibility of earth and
earth to the solidarity of fire.
On this principle, nothing possesses an essential-nature of its very
own; every several thing is a blend, and its name is merely an
indication of the dominant constituent.
Thus we are told that earth cannot have concrete existence without the
help of some moist element -- the moisture in water being the necessary
adhesive -- but admitting that we so find it, there is still a
contradiction in pretending that any one element has a being of its own
and in the same breath denying its self-coherence, making its
subsistence depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the
specific element to nothing. How can we talk of the existence of the
definite Kind, earth -- earth essential -- if there exists no single
particle of earth which actually is earth without any need of water to
secure its self-cohesion? What has such an adhesive to act upon if
there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it may
bind particle after particle in its business of producing the
continuous mass? If there is any such given magnitude, large or small,
of pure earth, then earth can exist in its own nature, independently of
water: if there is no such primary particle of pure earth, then there
is nothing whatever for the water to bind. As for air -- air unchanged,
retaining its distinctive quality -- how could it conduce to the
subsistence of a dense material like earth?
Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of it as necessary not to
the existence but to the visibility of earth and the other elements;
and certainly light is essential to all visibility -- we cannot say
that we see darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen,
as silence means nothing being heard.
But all this does not assure us that the earth to be visible must
contain fire: light is sufficient: snow, for example, and other
extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire -- though
of course it might be said that fire was once there and communicated
colour before disappearing.
As to the composition of water, we must leave it an open question
whether there can be such a thing as water without a certain proportion
of earth.
But how can air, the yielding element, contain earth?
Fire, again: is earth perhaps necessary there since fire is by its own
nature devoid of continuity and not a thing of three dimensions?
Supposing it does not possess the solidity of the three dimensions, it
has that of its thrust; now, cannot this belong to it by the mere right
and fact of its being one of the corporeal entities in nature? Hardness
is another matter, a property confined to earth-stuff. Remember that
gold -- which is water -- becomes dense by the accession not of earth
but of denseness or consolidation: in the same way fire, with Soul
present within it, may consolidate itself upon the power of the Soul;
and there are living beings of fire among the Celestials.
But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching that all the elements enter
into the composition of every living thing?
For this sphere, no; but to lift clay into the heavens is against
nature, contrary to the laws of her ordaining: it is difficult, too, to
think of that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly bodies in its
course nor could such material conduce to the splendour and white glint
of the celestial fire.
7. We can scarcely do better, in fine, than follow Plato.
Thus:
In the universe as a whole there must necessarily be such a degree of
solidity, that is to say, of resistance, as will ensure that the earth,
set in the centre, be a sure footing and support to the living beings
moving over it, and inevitably communicate something of its own density
to them: the earth will possess coherence by its own unaided quality,
but visibility by the presence of fire: it will contain water against
the dryness which would prevent the cohesion of its particles; it will
hold air to lighten its bulky matters; it will be in contact with the
celestial fire -- not as being a member of the sidereal system but by
the simple fact that the fire there and our earth both belong to the
ordered universe so that something of the earth is taken up by the fire
as something of the fire by the earth and something of everything by
everything else.
This borrowing, however, does not mean that the one thing taking-up
from the other enters into a composition, becoming an element in a
total of both: it is simply a consequence of the kosmic fellowship; the
participant retains its own being and takes over not the thing itself
but some property of the thing, not air but air's yielding softness,
not fire but fire's incandescence: mixing is another process, a
complete surrender with a resultant compound not, as in this case,
earth -- remaining earth, the solidity and density we know -- with
something of fire's qualities superadded.
We have authority for this where we read:
"At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a light": he is
speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and,
again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be
anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is
light, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm:
this light is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that
other "light" which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce
incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the
veritable "incandescent body." Plato's word earthy is commonly taken in
too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of
solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the
concrete clay.
Fire of this order, giving forth this purest light, belongs to the
upper realm, and there its seat is fixed by nature; but we must not, on
that account, suppose the flame of earth to be associated with the
beings of that higher sphere.
No: the flame of this world, once it has attained a certain height, is
extinguished by the currents of air opposed to it. Moreover, as it
carries an earthy element on its upward path, it is weighed downwards
and cannot reach those loftier regions. It comes to a stand somewhere
below the moon -- making the air at that point subtler -- and its
flame, if any flame can persist, is subdued and softened, and no longer
retains its first intensity, but gives out only what radiance it
reflects from the light above.
And it is that loftier light -- falling variously upon the stars; to
each in a certain proportion -- that gives them their characteristic
differences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just such light
constitutes also the still higher heavenly bodies which, however, like
clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting
transparency of their material substance and also by their very
distance.
8. Now: given a light of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at
its appointed station, pure light in purest place, what mode of outflow
from it can be conceived possible? Such a Kind is not so constituted as
to flow downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions
no power to force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always
be very different from body left to itself; the bodily substance of the
heavens has that contact and will show that difference.
Besides, the corporeal substance nearest to the heavens would be air or
fire: air has no destructive quality; fire would be powerless there
since it could not enter into effective contact: in its very rush it
would change before its attack could be felt; and, apart from that, it
is of the lesser order, no match for what it would be opposing in those
higher regions.
Again, fire acts by imparting heat: now it cannot be the source of heat
to what is already hot by nature; and anything it is to destroy must as
a first condition be heated by it, must be brought to a pitch of heat
fatal to the nature concerned.
In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to ensure
their permanence -- or to produce their circular movement, for it has
never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line; on
the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or
move by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We
cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly bodies stand in need of
replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the
celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is
not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration
necessary in this realm of composite bodies always in flux: we must
recognise that the changes that take place in bodies here represent a
slipping-away from the being [a phenomenon not incident to the
celestial sphere] and take place at the dictate of a Principle not
dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the
permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its
coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an
antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess
the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm.
__________________________________________________________________
SECOND TRACTATE.
THE HEAVENLY CIRCUIT.
1. But whence that circular movement?
In imitation of the Intellectual-Principle.
And does this movement belong to the material part or to the Soul? Can
we account for it on the ground that the Soul has itself at once for
centre and for the goal to which it must be ceaselessly moving; or
that, being self-centred it is not of unlimited extension [and
consequently must move ceaselessly to be omnipresent], and that its
revolution carries the material mass with it?
If the Soul had been the moving power [by any such semi-physical
action] it would be so no longer; it would have accomplished the act of
moving and have brought the universe to rest; there would be an end of
this endless revolution.
In fact the Soul must be in repose or at least cannot have spatial
movement; how then, having itself a movement of quite another order,
could it communicate spatial movement?
But perhaps the circular movement [of the Kosmos as soul and body] is
not spatial or is spatial not primarily but only incidentally.
What, by this explanation, would be the essential movement of the
kosmic soul?
A movement towards itself, the movement of self-awareness, of
self-intellection, of the living of its life, the movement of its
reaching to all things so that nothing shall lie outside of it, nothing
anywhere but within its scope.
The dominant in a living thing is what compasses it entirely and makes
it a unity.
If the Soul has no motion of any kind, it would not vitally compass the
Kosmos nor would the Kosmos, a thing of body, keep its content alive,
for the life of body is movement.
Any spatial motion there is will be limited; it will be not that of
Soul untrammelled but that of a material frame ensouled, an animated
organism; the movement will be partly of body, partly of Soul, the body
tending to the straight line which its nature imposes, the Soul
restraining it; the resultant will be the compromise movement of a
thing at once carried forward and at rest.
But supposing that the circular movement is to be attributed to the
body, how is it to be explained, since all body, including fire [which
constitutes the heavens] has straightforward motion?
The answer is that forthright movement is maintained only pending
arrival at the place for which the moving thing is destined: where a
thing is ordained to be, there it seeks, of its nature, to come for its
rest; its motion is its tendence to its appointed place.
Then, since the fire of the sidereal system has attained its goal, why
does it not stay at rest?
Evidently because the very nature of fire is to be mobile: if it did
not take the curve, its straight line would finally fling it outside
the universe: the circular course, then, is imperative.
But this would imply an act of providence?
Not quite: rather its own act under providence; attaining to that
realm, it must still take the circular course by its indwelling nature;
for it seeks the straight path onwards but finds no further space and
is driven back so that it recoils on the only course left to it: there
is nothing beyond; it has reached the ultimate; it runs its course in
the regions it occupies, itself its own sphere, not destined to come to
rest there, existing to move.
Further, the centre of a circle [and therefore of the Kosmos] is
distinctively a point of rest: if the circumference outside were not in
motion, the universe would be no more than one vast centre. And
movement around the centre is all the more to be expected in the case
of a living thing whose nature binds it within a body. Such motion
alone can constitute its impulse towards its centre: it cannot coincide
with the centre, for then there would be no circle; since this may not
be, it whirls about it; so only can it indulge its tendence.
If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are
not to think of a painful driving [wearing it down at last]; the soul
does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for "Nature" is no
other than the custom the All-Soul has established. Omnipresent in its
entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates
that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their
degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing
towards it.
If the Soul halted anywhere, there the Kosmos, too, brought so far,
would halt: but the Soul encompasses all, and so the Kosmos moves,
seeking everything.
Yet never to attain?
On the contrary this very motion is its eternal attainment.
Or, better; the Soul is ceaselessly leading the Kosmos towards itself:
the continuous attraction communicates a continuous movement -- not to
some outside space but towards the Soul and in the one sphere with it,
not in the straight line [which would ultimately bring the moving body
outside and below the Soul], but in the curving course in which the
moving body at every stage possesses the Soul that is attracting it and
bestowing itself upon it.
If the soul were stationary, that is if [instead of presiding over a
Kosmos] it dwelt wholly and solely in the realm in which every member
is at rest, motion would be unknown; but, since the Soul is not fixed
in some one station There, the Kosmos must travel to every point in
quest of it, and never outside it: in a circle, therefore.
2. And what of lower things? [Why have they not this motion?]
[Their case is very different]: the single thing here is not an all but
a part and limited to a given segment of space; that other realm is
all, is space, so to speak, and is subject to no hindrance or control,
for in itself it is all that is.
And men?
As a self, each is a personal whole, no doubt; but as member of the
universe, each is a partial thing.
But if, wherever the circling body be, it possesses the Soul, what need
of the circling?
Because everywhere it finds something else besides the Soul [which it
desires to possess alone].
The circular movement would be explained, too, if the Soul's power may
be taken as resident at its centre.
Here, however, we must distinguish between a centre in reference to the
two different natures, body and Soul.
In body, centre is a point of place; in Soul it is a source, the source
of some other nature. The word, which without qualification would mean
the midpoint of a spheric mass, may serve in the double reference; and,
as in a material mass so in the Soul, there must be a centre, that
around which the object, Soul or material mass, revolves.
The Soul exists in revolution around God to whom it clings in love,
holding itself to the utmost of its power near to Him as the Being on
which all depends; and since it cannot coincide with God it circles
about Him.
Why then do not all souls [i.e., the lower, also, as those of men and
animals] thus circle about the Godhead?
Every Soul does in its own rank and place.
And why not our very bodies, also?
Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the
body's impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this
circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it,
while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and
easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion
in it at all.
And it may very well be that even in us the Spirit which dwells with
the Soul does thus circle about the divinity. For since God is
omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular
course: God is not stationed.
Similarly Plato attributes to the stars not only the spheric movement
belonging to the universe as a whole but also to each a revolution
around their common centre; each -- not by way of thought but by links
of natural necessity -- has in its own place taken hold of God and
exults.
3. The truth may be resumed in this way:
There is a lowest power of the Soul, a nearest to earth, and this is
interwoven throughout the entire universe: another phase possesses
sensation, while yet another includes the Reason which is concerned
with the objects of sensation: this higher phase holds itself to the
spheres, poised towards the Above but hovering over the lesser Soul and
giving forth to it an effluence which makes it more intensely vital.
The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and
supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it has thrust
upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by the
higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this
upward tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is
involved: for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree
moved, without being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and
the sphere is set in motion. Something of the same kind happens in the
case of our bodies: the unspatial movement of the Soul -- in happiness,
for instance, or at the idea of some pleasant event -- sets up a
spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in its own region
some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases
it; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature,
it moves the body, in the body's region, that is in space.
As for that phase of the Soul in which sensation is vested, it, too,
takes its good from the Supreme above itself and moves, rejoicingly, in
quest of it: and since the object of its desire is everywhere, it too
ranges always through the entire scope of the universe.
The Intellectual-Principle has no such progress in any region; its
movement is a stationary act, for it turns upon itself.
And this is why the All, circling as it does, is at the same time at
rest.
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
ARE THE STARS CAUSES?
1. That the circuit of the stars indicates definite events to come but
without being the cause direct of all that happens, has been elsewhere
affirmed, and proved by some modicum of argument: but the subject
demands more precise and detailed investigation for to take the one
view rather than the other is of no small moment.
The belief is that the planets in their courses actually produce not
merely such conditions as poverty, wealth, health and sickness but even
ugliness and beauty and, gravest of all, vices and virtue and the very
acts that spring from these qualities, the definite doings of each
moment of virtue or vice. We are to suppose the stars to be annoyed
with men -- and upon matters in which men, moulded to what they are by
the stars themselves, can surely do them no wrong.
They will be distributing what pass for their good gifts, not out of
kindness towards the recipients but as they themselves are affected
pleasantly or disagreeably at the various points of their course; so
that they must be supposed to change their plans as they stand at their
zeniths or are declining.
More absurdly still, some of them are supposed to be malicious and
others to be helpful, and yet the evil stars will bestow favours and
the benevolent act harshly: further, their action alters as they see
each other or not, so that, after all, they possess no definite nature
but vary according to their angles of aspect; a star is kindly when it
sees one of its fellows but changes at sight of another: and there is
even a distinction to be made in the seeing as it occurs in this figure
or in that. Lastly, all acting together, the fused influence is
different again from that of each single star, just as the blending of
distinct fluids gives a mixture unlike any of them.
Since these opinions and others of the same order are prevalent, it
will be well to examine them carefully one by one, beginning with the
fundamental question:
2. Are these planets to be thought of as soulless or unsouled?
Suppose them, first, to be without Soul.
In that case they can purvey only heat or cold -- if cold from the
stars can be thought of -- that is to say, any communication from them
will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to communicate
to us is merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change can
be caused in the bodies affected since emanations merely corporeal
cannot differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon
earth into one collective resultant: at most the differences would be
such as depend upon local position, upon nearness or farness with
regard to the centre of influence. This reasoning, of course, is as
valid of any cold emanation there may be as of the warm.
Now, what is there in such corporeal action to account for the various
classes and kinds of men, learned and illiterate, scholars as against
orators, musicians as against people of other professions? Can a power
merely physical make rich or poor? Can it bring about such conditions
as in no sense depend upon the interaction of corporeal elements? Could
it, for example, bring a man such and such a brother, father, son, or
wife, give him a stroke of good fortune at a particular moment, or make
him generalissimo or king?
Next, suppose the stars to have life and mind and to be effective by
deliberate purpose.
In that case, what have they suffered from us that they should, in free
will, do us hurt, they who are established in a divine place,
themselves divine? There is nothing in their nature of what makes men
base, nor can our weal or woe bring them the slightest good or ill.
3. Possibly, however, they act not by choice but under stress of their
several positions and collective figures?
But if position and figure determined their action each several one
would necessarily cause identical effects with every other on entering
any given place or pattern.
And that raises the question what effect for good or bad can be
produced upon any one of them by its transit in the parallel of this or
that section of the Zodiac circle -- for they are not in the Zodiacal
figure itself but considerably beneath it especially since, whatever
point they touch, they are always in the heavens.
It is absurd to think that the particular grouping under which a star
passes can modify either its character or its earthward influences. And
can we imagine it altered by its own progression as it rises, stands at
centre, declines? Exultant when at centre; dejected or enfeebled in
declension; some raging as they rise and growing benignant as they set,
while declension brings out the best in one among them; surely this
cannot be?
We must not forget that invariably every star, considered in itself, is
at centre with regard to some one given group and in decline with
regard to another and vice versa; and, very certainly, it is not at
once happy and sad, angry and kindly. There is no reasonable escape in
representing some of them as glad in their setting, others in their
rising: they would still be grieving and glad at one and the same time.
Further, why should any distress of theirs work harm to us?
No: we cannot think of them as grieving at all or as being cheerful
upon occasions: they must be continuously serene, happy in the good
they enjoy and the Vision before them. Each lives its own free life;
each finds its Good in its own Act; and this Act is not directed
towards us.
Like the birds of augury, the living beings of the heavens, having no
lot or part with us, may serve incidentally to foreshow the future, but
they have absolutely no main function in our regard.
4. It is again not in reason that a particular star should be gladdened
by seeing this or that other while, in a second couple, such an aspect
is distressing: what enmities can affect such beings? what causes of
enmity can there be among them?
And why should there be any difference as a given star sees certain
others from the corner of a triangle or in opposition or at the angle
of a square?
Why, again, should it see its fellow from some one given position and
yet, in the next Zodiacal figure, not see it, though the two are
actually nearer?
And, the cardinal question; by what conceivable process could they
affect what is attributed to them? How explain either the action of any
single star independently or, still more perplexing, the effect of
their combined intentions?
We cannot think of them entering into compromises, each renouncing
something of its efficiency and their final action in our regard
amounting to a concerted plan.
No one star would suppress the contribution of another, nor would star
yield to star and shape its conduct under suasion.
As for the fancy that while one is glad when it enters another's
region, the second is vexed when in its turn it occupies the place of
the first, surely this is like starting with the supposition of two
friends and then going on to talk of one being attracted to the other
who, however, abhors the first.
5. When they tell us that a certain cold star is more benevolent to us
in proportion as it is further away, they clearly make its harmful
influence depend upon the coldness of its nature; and yet it ought to
be beneficent to us when it is in the opposed Zodiacal figures.
When the cold planet, we are told, is in opposition to the cold, both
become meanacing: but the natural effect would be a compromise.
And we are asked to believe that one of them is happy by day and grows
kindly under the warmth, while another, of a fiery nature, is most
cheerful by night -- as if it were not always day to them, light to
them, and as if the first one could be darkened by night at that great
distance above the earth's shadow.
Then there is the notion that the moon, in conjunction with a certain
star, is softened at her full but is malignant in the same conjunction
when her light has waned; yet, if anything of this order could be
admitted, the very opposite would be the case. For when she is full to
us she must be dark on the further hemisphere, that is to that star
which stands above her; and when dark to us she is full to that other
star, upon which only then, on the contrary, does she look with her
light. To the moon itself, in fact, it can make no difference in what
aspect she stands, for she is always lit on the upper or on the under
half: to the other star, the warmth from the moon, of which they speak,
might make a difference; but that warmth would reach it precisely when
the moon is without light to us; at its darkest to us it is full to
that other, and therefore beneficent. The darkness of the moon to us is
of moment to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet above. That
planet, it is alleged, can give no help on account of its remoteness
and therefore seems less well disposed; but the moon at its full
suffices to the lower realm so that the distance of the other is of no
importance. When the moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with the
Fiery Star she is held to be favourable: the reason alleged is that the
force of Mars is all-sufficient since it contains more fire than it
needs.
The truth is that while the material emanations from the living beings
of the heavenly system are of various degrees of warmth -- planet
differing from planet in this respect -- no cold comes from them: the
nature of the space in which they have their being is voucher for that.
The star known as Jupiter includes a due measure of fire [and warmth],
in this resembling the Morning-star and therefore seeming to be in
alliance with it. In aspect with what is known as the Fiery Star,
Jupiter is beneficent by virtue of the mixing of influences: in aspect
with Saturn unfriendly by dint of distance. Mercury, it would seem, is
indifferent whatever stars it be in aspect with; for it adopts any and
every character.
But all the stars are serviceable to the Universe, and therefore can
stand to each other only as the service of the Universe demands, in a
harmony like that observed in the members of any one animal form. They
exist essentially for the purpose of the Universe, just as the gall
exists for the purposes of the body as a whole not less than for its
own immediate function: it is to be the inciter of the animal spirits
but without allowing the entire organism and its own especial region to
run riot. Some such balance of function was indispensable in the All --
bitter with sweet. There must be differentiation -- eyes and so forth
-- but all the members will be in sympathy with the entire animal frame
to which they belong. Only so can there be a unity and a total harmony.
And in such a total, analogy will make every part a Sign.
6. But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in certain aspects should
cause adulteries -- as if they could thus, through the agency of human
incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires -- is not such a notion
the height of unreason? And who could accept the fancy that their
happiness comes from their seeing each other in this or that relative
position and not from their own settled nature?
Again: countless myriads of living beings are born and continue to be:
to minister continuously to every separate one of these; to make them
famous, rich, poor, lascivious; to shape the active tendencies of every
single one -- what kind of life is this for the stars, how could they
possibly handle a task so huge?
They are to watch, we must suppose, the rising of each several
constellation and upon that signal to act; such a one, they see, has
risen by so many degrees, representing so many of the periods of its
upward path; they reckon on their fingers at what moment they must take
the action which, executed prematurely, would be out of order: and in
the sum, there is no One Being controlling the entire scheme; all is
made over to the stars singly, as if there were no Sovereign Unity,
standing as source of all the forms of Being in subordinate association
with it, and delegating to the separate members, in their appropriate
Kinds, the task of accomplishing its purposes and bringing its latent
potentiality into act.
This is a separatist theory, tenable only by minds ignorant of the
nature of a Universe which has a ruling principle and a first cause
operative downwards through every member.
7. But, if the stars announce the future -- as we hold of many other
things also -- what explanation of the cause have we to offer? What
explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless the
particular is included under some general principle of order, there can
be no signification.
We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the
heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the
other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the
quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying any living
unit enables us to reason from member to member, so that for example we
may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications
in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are
members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies.
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can
read another, a process familiar to all of us in not a few examples of
everyday experience.
But what is the comprehensive principle of co-ordination? Establish
this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not only by
stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive
guidance in our varied concerns.
All things must be enchained; and the sympathy and correspondence
obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist, first, and most
intensely, in the All. There must be one principle constituting this
unit of many forms of life and enclosing the several members within the
unity, while at the same time, precisely as in each thing of detail the
parts too have each a definite function, so in the All each several
member must have its own task -- but more markedly so since in this
case the parts are not merely members but themselves Alls, members of
the loftier Kind.
Thus each entity takes its origin from one Principle and, therefore,
while executing its own function, works in with every other member of
that All from which its distinct task has by no means cut it off: each
performs its act, each receives something from the others, every one at
its own moment bringing its touch of sweet or bitter. And there is
nothing undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process: all is one
scheme of differentiation, starting from the Firsts and working itself
out in a continuous progression of Kinds.
8. Soul, then, in the same way, is intent upon a task of its own; alike
in its direct course and in its divagation it is the cause of all by
its possession of the Thought of the First Principle: thus a Law of
Justice goes with all that exists in the Universe which, otherwise,
would be dissolved, and is perdurable because the entire fabric is
guided as much by the orderliness as by the power of the controlling
force. And in this order the stars, as being no minor members of the
heavenly system, are co-operators contributing at once to its stately
beauty and to its symbolic quality. Their symbolic power extends to the
entire realm of sense, their efficacy only to what they patently do.
For our part, nature keeps us upon the work of the Soul as long as we
are not wrecked in the multiplicity of the Universe: once thus sunk and
held we pay the penalty, which consists both in the fall itself and in
the lower rank thus entailed upon us: riches and poverty are caused by
the combinations of external fact.
And what of virtue and vice?
That question has been amply discussed elsewhere: in a word, virtue is
ours by the ancient staple of the Soul; vice is due to the commerce of
a Soul with the outer world.
9. This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the
ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation
of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit: the Fates
with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the
birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through
Necessity.
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but
it is the divinities moving in the kosmos [the stars] that infuse the
powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire,
our sense of pleasure and of pain -- and that lower phase of the Soul
in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality
is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul [as total of Principle and
affections] takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very
entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars'
ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament,
and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.
What, after all this, remains to stand for the "We"?
The "We" is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with
certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are
by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all
this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil
safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere,
severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man
is to be something better than a body ensouled -- the bodily element
dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant
life-course mainly of the body -- for in such a combination all is, in
fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is
progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine,
towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate
usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher,
the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It -- unless
one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live
fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the
sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged
along with the whole thus adopted.
For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that
compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the
Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a
certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the
Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its
rays into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality belongs to
the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.
To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness.
In their efficacy upon the [material] All, they act as parts of it, as
ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon what is partial; body
is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through
which is transmitted something of the star's will and of that authentic
Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.
But [with every allowance to the lower forces] all follows either upon
that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It -- we may think of the
Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe -- or upon
whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul [the divine first Soul] to
the other, its Kin [the Soul of any particular being]. All that is
graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend,
and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little.
The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it; "the
rest," we read, "is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."
10. If all this be true, we must at once admit signification, though,
neither singly nor collectively, can we ascribe to the stars any
efficacy except in what concerns the [material] All and in what is of
their own function.
We must admit that the Soul before entering into birth presents itself
bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body
except under stress of a powerful inner impulse; we must admit some
element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and
conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit: and we must admit some
effective power in that circuit itself; it is co-operative, and
completes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which
everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part.
11. And we must remember that what comes from the supernals does not
enter into the recipients as it left the source; fire, for instance,
will be duller; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in ugly
forms of the passion; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced as
to display the mean of manly courage, will come out as either ferocity
or faint-heartedness; and ambition . . . in love . . .; and the
instinct towards good sets up the pursuit of semblant beauty;
intellectual power at its lowest produces the extreme of wickedness,
for wickedness is a miscalculating effort towards Intelligence.
Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, deteriorates
again within itself: things of any kind that approach from above,
altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their
blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other.
12. All that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity and
every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so
that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The effluence
does not make the horse but adds something to it; for horse comes by
horse, and man by man: the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping,
but the man has his origin in the Human-Principle. Outer things have
their effect, sometimes to hurt and sometimes to help; like a father,
they often contribute to good but sometimes also to harm; but they do
not wrench the human being from the foundations of its nature; though
sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the
second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection; the
Ideal has been attenuated.
13. Of phenomena of this sphere some derive from the Kosmic Circuit and
some not: we must take them singly and mark them off, assigning to each
its origin.
The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul
governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and
plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in
every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them
to the unity of which they are portions; the entire force of the Soul
is represented in the All, but, in the parts, Soul is present only in
proportion to the degree of essential reality held by each of such
partial objects. Surrounding every separate entity there are other
entities, whose approach will sometimes be hostile and sometimes
helpful to the purpose of its nature; but to the All taken in its
length and breadth each and every separate existent is an adjusted
part, holding its own characteristic and yet contributing by its own
native tendency to the entire life-history of the Universe.
The soulless parts of the All are merely instruments; all their action
is effected, so to speak, under a compulsion from outside themselves.
The ensouled fall into two classes. The one kind has a motion of its
own, but haphazard like that of horses between the shafts but before
their driver sets the course; they are set right by the whip. In the
Living-Being possessed of Reason, the nature-principle includes the
driver; where the driver is intelligent, it takes in the main a
straight path to a set end. But both classes are members of the All and
co-operate towards the general purpose.
The greater and most valuable among them have an important operation
over a wide range: their contribution towards the life of the whole
consists in acting, not in being acted upon; others, but feebly
equipped for action, are almost wholly passive; there is an
intermediate order whose members contain within themselves a principle
of productivity and activity and make themselves very effective in many
spheres or ways and yet serve also by their passivity.
Thus the All stands as one all-complete Life, whose members, to the
measure in which each contains within itself the Highest, effect all
that is high and noble: and the entire scheme must be subordinate to
its Dirigeant as an army to its general, "following upon Zeus" -- it
has been said -- "as he proceeds towards the Intelligible Kind."
Secondary in the All are those of its parts which possess a less
exalted nature just as in us the members rank lower than the Soul; and
so all through, there is a general analogy between the things of the
All and our own members -- none of quite equal rank.
All living things, then -- all in the heavens and all elsewhere -- fall
under the general Reason-Principle of the All -- they have been made
parts with a view to the whole: not one of these parts, however
exalted, has power to effect any alteration of these Reason-Principles
or of things shaped by them and to them; some modification one part may
work upon another, whether for better or for worse; but there is no
power that can wrest anything outside of its distinct nature.
The part effecting such a modification for the worse may act in several
ways.
It may set up some weakness restricted to the material frame. Or it may
carry the weakness through to the sympathetic Soul which by the medium
of the material frame, become a power to debasement, has been delivered
over, though never in its essence, to the inferior order of being. Or,
in the case of a material frame ill-organized, it may check all such
action [of the Soul] upon the material frame as demands a certain
collaboration in the part acted upon: thus a lyre may be so ill-strung
as to be incapable of the melodic exactitude necessary to musical
effect.
14. What of poverty and riches, glory and power?
In the case of inherited fortune, the stars merely announce a rich man,
exactly as they announce the high social standing of the child born to
a distinguished house.
Wealth may be due to personal activity: in this case if the body has
contributed, part of the effect is due to whatever has contributed
towards the physical powers, first the parents and then, if place has
had its influence, sky and earth; if the body has borne no part of the
burden, then the success, and all the splendid accompaniments added by
the Recompensers, must be attributed to virtue exclusively. If fortune
has come by gift from the good, then the source of the wealth is,
again, virtue: if by gift from the evil, but to a meritorious
recipient, then the credit must be given to the action of the best in
them: if the recipient is himself unprincipled, the wealth must be
attributed primarily to the very wickedness and to whatsoever is
responsible for the wickedness, while the givers bear an equal share in
the wrong.
When the success is due to labour, tillage for example, it must be put
down to the tiller, with all his environment as contributory. In the
case of treasure-trove, something from the All has entered into action;
and if this be so, it will be foreshown -- since all things make a
chain, so that we can speak of things universally. Money is lost: if by
robbery, the blame lies with the robber and the native principle
guiding him: if by shipwreck, the cause is the chain of events. As for
good fame, it is either deserved and then is due to the services done
and to the merit of those appraising them, or it is undeserved, and
then must be attributed to the injustice of those making the award. And
the same principle holds is regards power -- for this also may be
rightly or unrightly placed -- it depends either upon the merit of the
dispensers of place or upon the man himself who has effected his
purpose by the organization of supporters or in many other possible
ways. Marriages, similarly, are brought about either by choice or by
chance interplay of circumstance. And births are determined by
marriages: the child is moulded true to type when all goes well;
otherwise it is marred by some inner detriment, something due to the
mother personally or to an environment unfavourable to that particular
conception.
15. According to Plato, lots and choice play a part [in the
determination of human conditions] before the Spindle of Necessity is
turned; that once done, only the Spindle-destiny is valid; it fixes the
chosen conditions irretrievably since the elected guardian-spirit
becomes accessory to their accomplishment.
But what is the significance of the Lots?
By the Lots we are to understand birth into the conditions actually
existent in the All at the particular moment of each entry into body,
birth into such and such a physical frame, from such and such parents,
in this or that place, and generally all that in our phraseology is the
External.
For Particulars and Universals alike it is established that to the
first of those known as the Fates, to Clotho the Spinner, must be due
the unity and as it were interweaving of all that exists: Lachesis
presides over the Lots: to Atropos must necessarily belong the conduct
of mundane events.
Of men, some enter into life as fragments of the All, bound to that
which is external to themselves: they are victims of a sort of
fascination, and are hardly, or not at all, themselves: but others
mastering all this -- straining, so to speak, by the head towards the
Higher, to what is outside even the Soul -- preserve still the nobility
and the ancient privilege of the Soul's essential being.
For certainly we cannot think of the Soul as a thing whose nature is
just a sum of impressions from outside -- as if it, alone, of all that
exists, had no native character.
No: much more than all else, the Soul, possessing the Idea which
belongs to a Principle, must have as its native wealth many powers
serving to the activities of its Kind. It is an Essential-Existent and
with this Existence must go desire and act and the tendency towards
some good.
While body and soul stand one combined thing, there is a joint nature,
a definite entity having definite functions and employments; but as
soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept apart, its very
own: it ceases to take the body's concerns to itself: it has vision
now: body and soul stand widely apart.
16. The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the union
for the period of embodiment and what phase remains distinct, what is
separable and what necessarily interlinked, and in general what the
Living-Being is.
On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter must be
examined later on from quite other considerations than occupy us here.
For the present let us explain in what sense we have described the All
as the expressed idea of the Governing Soul.
One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities in
succession -- man followed by horse and other animals domestic or wild:
fire and earth, though, first of all -- that it watches these creations
acting upon each other whether to help or to harm, observes, and no
more, the tangled web formed of all these strands, and their unfailing
sequences; and that it makes no concern of the result beyond securing
the reproduction of the primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest
to act upon each other according to their definite natures.
Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes about,
since its first creations have set up the entire enchainment.
No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed by the Soul] covers all the
action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even here, by any
form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.
Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the
Reason-Principles?
To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action; they
exist and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains the
engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought
to pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to
each other, similar consequences must inevitably ensue: the Soul
adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due
outcome and links all into a total.
All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn
an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And perhaps
this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for instance, are
not as they were of old; by dint of interval and of the inevitable law,
the Reason-Principles have ceded something to the characteristics of
the Matter.
But:
The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the
fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no respite from
this care, but is ever labouring to bring about perfection, planning to
lead all to an unending state of excellence -- like a farmer, first
sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where
rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc.
If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable, we are obliged
to think that the Reason-Principles themselves foreknew or even
contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.
But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the
Reason-Principles, though the arts and their guiding principle do not
include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the destruction of the
work of art.
And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing contrary to
nature, nothing evil.
Still, by the side of the better there exists also what is less good.
Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All.
Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may
co-operate; and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe:
all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better
elements are compelled into existence and moulded to their function by
the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in
the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves;
the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the
Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of
these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock
produced the less good.
Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the
better; so that out of the total of things -- modified by Soul on the
one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand as sound
as in the Reason-Principles -- there is, in the end, a Unity.
17. But these Reason-Principles, contained in the Soul, are they
Thoughts?
And if so, by what process does the Soul create in accordance with
these Thoughts?
It is upon Matter that this act of the Reason is exercised; and what
acts physically is not an intellectual operation or a vision, but a
power modifying matter, not conscious of it but merely acting upon it:
the Reason-Principle, in other words, acts much like a force producing
a figure or pattern upon water -- that of a circle, suppose, where the
formation of the ring is conditioned by something distinct from that
force itself.
If this is so, the prior puissance of the Soul [that which conveys the
Reason-Principles] must act by manipulating the other Soul, that which
is united with Matter and has the generative function.
But is this handling the result of calculation?
Calculation implies reference. Reference, then, to something outside or
to something contained within itself? If to its own content, there is
no need of reasoning, which could not itself perform the act of
creation; creation is the operation of that phase of the Soul which
contains Ideal-Principles; for that is its stronger puissance, its
creative part.
It creates, then, on the model of the Ideas; for, what it has received
from the Intellectual-Principle it must pass on in turn.
In sum, then, the Intellectual-Principle gives from itself to the Soul
of the All which follows immediately upon it: this again gives forth
from itself to its next, illuminated and imprinted by it; and that
secondary Soul at once begins to create, as under order, unhindered in
some of its creations, striving in others against the repugnance of
Matter.
It has a creative power, derived; it is stored with Reason-Principles
not the very originals: therefore it creates, but not in full
accordance with the Principles from which it has been endowed:
something enters from itself; and, plainly, this is inferior. The issue
then is something living, yes; but imperfect, hindering its own life,
something very poor and reluctant and crude, formed in a Matter that is
the fallen sediment of the Higher Order, bitter and embittering. This
is the Soul's contribution to the All.
18. Are the evils in the Universe necessary because it is of later
origin than the Higher Sphere?
Perhaps rather because without evil the All would be incomplete. For
most or even all forms of evil serve the Universe -- much as the
poisonous snake has its use -- though in most cases their function is
unknown. Vice itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that
is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to
thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security.
If all this is so, then [the secret of creation is that] the Soul of
the All abides in contemplation of the Highest and Best, ceaselessly
striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God: but, thus
absorbing and filled full, it overflows -- so to speak -- and the image
it gives forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the
creative puissance.
This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of
the Soul which is primarily saturated from the Divine Intelligence. But
the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the
Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third
Kind.
Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described as an image continuously
being imaged, the First and the Second Principles immobile, the Third,
too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in Matter, having
motion.
For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine Thought-Forms
will pour forth into that phase of the Soul: as long as there is a sun,
all that streams from it will be some form of Light.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
MATTER IN ITS TWO KINDS.
1. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of
such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain
base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same way. But
departure begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is
in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.
To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings;
existence is limited to bodies; there is one only Matter, the stuff
underlying the primal-constituents of the Universe: existence is
nothing but this Matter: everything is some modification of this; the
elements of the Universe are simply this Matter in a certain condition.
The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings
so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter -- and this
though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void of quality,
but a magnitude.
Another school makes it incorporeal: among these, not all hold the
theory of one only Matter; some of them while they maintain the one
Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of bodily
forms, admit another, a prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base
of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.
2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the
existence of this other Kind and to examine its nature and the mode of
its Being.
Now if Matter must characteristically be undetermined, void of shape,
while in that sphere of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks
determination, nothing shapeless, there can be no Matter there.
Further, if all that order is simplex, there can be no need of Matter,
whose function is to join with some other element to form a compound:
it will be found of necessity in things of derived existence and
shifting nature -- the signs which lead us to the notion of Matter --
but it is unnecessary to the primal.
And again, where could it have come from? whence did it take its being?
If it is derived, it has a source: if it is eternal, then the
Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a
meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the
union constitutes a body; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme.
3. Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly
cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies
absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and
[through them] to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul
itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine
Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form.
Further, a compound in the Intellectual order is not to be confounded
with a compound in the realm of Matter; the Divine Reasons are
compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that [lower]
Nature which works towards Idea. And there is not only a difference of
function; there is a still more notable difference of source. Then,
too, the Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form:
in the eternal, Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two
are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this realm is all things in
turn, a new entity in every separate case, so that nothing is permanent
and one thing ceaselessly pushes another out of being: Matter has no
identity here. In the Intellectual it is all things at once: and
therefore has nothing to change into: it already and ever contains all.
This means that not even in its own Sphere is the Matter there at any
moment shapeless: no doubt that is true of the Matter here as well; but
shape is held by a very different right in the two orders of Matter.
As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing of process, this will be
clear when we are sure of its precise nature.
4. The present existence of the Ideal-Forms has been demonstrated
elsewhere: we take up our argument from that point.
If, then, there is more than one of such forming Ideas, there must of
necessity be some character common to all and equally some peculiar
character in each keeping them distinct.
This peculiar characteristic, this distinguishing difference, is the
individual shape. But if shape, then there is the shaped, that in which
the difference is lodged.
There is, therefore, a Matter accepting the shape, a permanent
substratum.
Further, admitting that there is an Intelligible Realm beyond, of which
this world is an image, then, since this world-compound is based on
Matter, there must be Matter there also.
And how can you predicate an ordered system without thinking of form,
and how think of form apart from the notion of something in which the
form is lodged?
No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact, utterly without parts, but
in some sense there is part there too. And in so far as these parts are
really separate from each other, any such division and difference can
be no other than a condition of Matter, of a something divided and
differentiated: in so far as that realm, though without parts, yet
consists of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in
a unity of which they are variations, reside in a Matter; for this
unity, since it is also a diversity, must be conceived of as varied and
multiform; it must have been shapeless before it took the form in which
variation occurs. For if we abstract from the Intellectual-Principle
the variety and the particular shapes, the Reason-Principles and the
Thoughts, what precedes these was something shapeless and undetermined,
nothing of what is actually present there.
5. It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its
content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity,
and that thus there is no Matter there.
But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily
forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body
achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two --
Matter and Idea -- by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes
continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on,
until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of
enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which,
therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The
Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular
object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it
declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness,
just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are
modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden
by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order
of Matter.
The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that in the
sense-world: so therefore does the Matter -- as much as the
forming-Idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter,
though it is the object of determination has, of its own nature, a life
defined and intellectual; the Matter of this sphere while it does
accept determination is not living or intellective, but a dead thing
decorated: any shape it takes is an image, exactly as the Base is an
image. There on the contrary the shape is a real-existent as is the
Base. Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be
right as long as they keep to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm: for
the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher
that accompanies it, is illuminated Being.
But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm, possess eternal
existence?
The solution of that question is the same as for the Ideas.
Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but
unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time: they have a derived
being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like the Kosmos,
always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their
Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible
which produces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which
produces the Matter there: it is the first movement; and movement and
differentiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as
one: this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination
[= Matter], needing The First to its determination which it achieves by
its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good;
unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light comes, and,
until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of light can be
authentic; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the true.
6. We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of body.
An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different
from themselves is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into
one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over
is not complete -- if it were we would have a Principle of Being
wrecked in Non-being -- nor does an engendered thing pass from utter
non-being into Being: what happens is that a new form takes the place
of an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one
form to receive the form of the incoming entity.
The same fact is clearly established by decay, a process implying a
compound object; where there is decay there is a distinction between
Matter and Form.
And the reasoning which shows the destructible to be a compound is
borne out by practical examples of reduction: a drinking vessel is
reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid; analogy forces us to believe
that the liquid too is reducible.
The basic-constituents of things must be either their Form-Idea or that
Primal Matter [of the Intelligible] or a compound of the Form and
Matter.
Form-Idea, pure and simple, they cannot be: for without Matter how
could things stand in their mass and magnitude?
Neither can they be that Primal Matter, for they are not
indestructible.
They must, therefore, consist of Matter and Form-Idea -- Form for
quality and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as being other
than Idea.
7. Empedokles in identifying his "elements" with Matter is refuted by
their decay.
Anaxagoras, in identifying his "primal-combination" with Matter -- to
which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but
the effective possession of all -- withdraws in this way the very
Intellectual-Principle he had introduced; for this Mind is not to him
the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea; and it is co-aeval with Matter,
not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible: for if
the combination derives Being by participation, Being is the prior; if
both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is
imperative [a ground of unification]. And if this Creator, Mind, must
pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-Ideas parcel-wise for
the Mind, with unending labour, to assort and allot? Surely the
undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one
comprehensive act?
As for the notion that all is in all, this clearly is impossible.
Those who make the base to be "the infinite" must define the term.
If this "infinite" means "of endless extension" there is no infinite
among beings; there is neither an infinity-in-itself [Infinity
Abstract] nor an infinity as an attribute to some body; for in the
first case every part of that infinity would be infinite and in the
second an object in which the infinity was present as an attribute
could not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex,
could not therefore be Matter.
Atoms again cannot meet the need of a base.
There are no atoms; all body is divisible endlessly: besides neither
the continuity nor the ductility of corporeal things is explicable
apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up of
atoms; and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but
atoms: a creative power could produce nothing from a material devoid of
continuity. Any number of reasons might be brought, and have been
brought, against this hypothesis and it need detain us no longer.
8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff,
continuous and without quality?
Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal; bodiliness would
be quality.
It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the sense-world and
not merely base to some while being to others achieved form.
Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but is not Matter pure and
simple. Nothing of this sort is our object: we are seeking the stuff
which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all that we
find in things of sense -- not merely such attributes as colour, heat
or cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness, shape and
therefore magnitude; though notice that to be present within magnitude
and shape is very different from possessing these qualities.
It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex, one distinct thing in
its nature; only so can it be void of all quality. The Principle which
gives it form gives this as something alien: so with magnitude and all
really-existent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed
a magnitude of its own, the Principle giving it form would be at the
mercy of that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within
the limit of the Matter's capacity: to imagine that Will keeping step
with its material is fantastic.
The Matter must be of later origin than the forming-power, and
therefore must be at its disposition throughout, ready to become
anything, ready therefore to any bulk; besides, if it possessed
magnitude, it would necessarily possess shape also: it would be doubly
inductile.
No: all that ever appears upon it is brought in by the Idea: the Idea
alone possesses: to it belongs the magnitude and all else that goes
with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it. Quantity is given with
the Ideal-Form in all the particular species -- man, bird, and
particular kind of bird.
The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by an outside power is not more
surprising than the imaging of Quality; Quality is no doubt a
Reason-Principle, but Quantity also -- being measure, number -- is
equally so.
9. But how can we conceive a thing having existence without having
magnitude?
We have only to think of things whose identity does not depend on their
quantity -- for certainly magnitude can be distinguished from existence
as can many other forms and attributes.
In a word, every unembodied Kind must be classed as without quantity,
and Matter is unembodied.
Besides quantitativeness itself [the Absolute-Principle] does not
possess quantity, which belongs only to things participating in it, a
consideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle. A
white object becomes white by the presence of whiteness; what makes an
organism white or of any other variety of colour is not itself a
specific colour but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle: in the
same way what gives an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of
magnitude but is Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute, or the
Reason-Principle.
This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats the Matter out into
Magnitude?
Not at all: the Matter was not previously shrunken small: there was no
littleness or bigness: the Idea gives Magnitude exactly as it gives
every quality not previously present.
10. But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter?
How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act
of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case?
The secret is Indetermination.
Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows the indeterminate.
Around this indefinite a definite conception will be realized, but the
way lies through indefiniteness.
All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act; in this case
Reason conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which
aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its
failure: therefore the representation of Matter must be spurious,
unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with
the alien reason.
This is Plato's meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a
sort of spurious reasoning.
What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an
utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn?
No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation.
The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour
not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes
perceptible to sense -- all that corresponds to light -- comes upon a
residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the
state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in
some way identical with the object of its spurious vision.
There is vision, then, in this approach of the Mind towards Matter?
Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit,
and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the Soul
is already bestowing Form.
But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has
no intellection whatever?
No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but
in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the
impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that
have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds [i.e., as
possessing with these forms a formless base] for they appear as things
that have accepted colour and other quality.
It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components; it has a
clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie [the Ideas] but only a dim
awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an
Ideal-Principle.
With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else: what
it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the
something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly,
this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of
non-knowing.
And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things,
is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the
thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost,
to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being.
11. "But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be
necessary to the existence of body?"
Some base to be the container of all the rest.
"A certain mass then; and if mass, then Magnitude? Obviously if your
Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose
it sizeless; then, what end does it serve? It never helped Idea or
quality; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude,
though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into
embodied entities by way of Matter."
"Or, taking a larger view, observe that actions, productive operations,
periods of time, movements, none of these have any such substratum and
yet are real things; in the same way the most elementary body has no
need of Matter; things may be, all, what they are, each after its own
kind, in their great variety, deriving the coherence of their being
from the blending of the various Ideal-Forms. This Matter with its
sizelessness seems, then, to be a name without a content."
Now, to begin with: extension is not an imperative condition of being a
recipient; it is necessary only where it happens to be a property
inherent to the recipient's peculiar mode of being. The Soul, for
example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended unity;
if magnitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in
extension. Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it
takes in; but this is because itself is a potential recipient of
spatial extension: animals and plants, in the same way, as they
increase in size, take quality in parallel development with quantity,
and they lose in the one as the other lessens.
No doubt in the case of things as we know them there is a certain mass
lying ready beforehand to the shaping power: but that is no reason for
expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called; for in such cases Matter
is not the absolute; it is that of some definite object; the Absolute
Matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside
itself.
A thing then need not have magnitude in order to receive form: it may
receive mass with everything else that comes to it at the moment of
becoming what it is to be: a phantasm of mass is enough, a primary
aptness for extension, a magnitude of no content -- whence the
identification that has been made of Matter with The Void.
But I prefer to use the word phantasm as hinting the indefiniteness
into which the Soul spills itself when it seeks to communicate with
Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither encompassing
it nor able to penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which
achievements would be an act of delimitation.
In other words, we have something which is to be described not as small
or great but as the great-and-small: for it is at once a mass and a
thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is the Matter on which
Mass is based and that, as it changes from great to small and small to
great, it traverses magnitude. Its very undeterminateness is a mass in
the same sense that of being a recipient of Magnitude -- though of
course only in the visible object.
In the order of things without Mass, all that is Ideal-Principle
possesses delimitation, each entity for itself, so that the conception
of Mass has no place in them: Matter, not delimited, having in its own
nature no stability, swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go
here, there and everywhere, becomes a thing of multiplicity: driven
into all shapes, becoming all things, it has that much of the character
of mass.
12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude: the Ideal-Forms
of body are Ideas installed in Mass.
But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject
that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering into
Magnitude and not into Matter -- is to represent them as being either
without Magnitude and without Real-Existence [and therefore
undistinguishable from the Matter] or not Ideal-Forms [apt to body] but
Reason-Principles [utterly removed] whose sphere could only be Soul; at
this, there would be no such thing as body [i.e., instead of
Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so producing body, there would be merely
Reason-Principles dwelling remote in Soul.]
The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since it has
been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from Magnitude.
Matter is the base of Identity to all that is composite: once each of
the constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no
need of any other base. No doubt there must be a container, as it were
a place, to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even body precede
place and space; the primal necessity, in order to the existence of
body, is Matter.
There is no force in the suggestion that, since production and act are
immaterial, corporeal entities also must be immaterial.
Bodies are compound, actions not. Further, Matter does in some sense
underlie action; it supplies the substratum to the doer: it is
permanently within him though it does not enter as a constituent into
the act where, indeed, it would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does
not change into another -- as would be the case if there were a
specific Matter of actions -- but the doer directs himself from one act
to another so that he is the Matter, himself, to his varying actions.
Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and,
therefore, to body.
It is, thus, no name void of content; we know there is such a base,
invisible and without bulk though it be.
If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities and
mass: for quality, or mass, or any such entity, taken by itself apart,
might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an obscure
existence: there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it
lurk, discerned by none of the senses.
It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour: it is not
heard, for it is no sound: it is no flavour or savour for nostrils or
palate: can it, perhaps, be known to touch? No: for neither is it
corporeal; and touch deals with body, which is known by being solid,
fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry -- all properties utterly lacking in
Matter.
It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of the
intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject; and so it
stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No bodiliness
belongs to it; bodiliness is itself a phase of Reason-Principle and so
is something different from Matter, as Matter, therefore, from it:
bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be
body manifest and not Matter unelaborated.
13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality
present to all the elements in common?
Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next,
how an attribute can be a substratum.
The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is
neither base nor bulk?
Again, if the quality possesses determination, it is not Matter the
undetermined; and anything without determination is not a quality but
is the substratum -- the very Matter we are seeking.
It may be suggested that perhaps this absence of quality means simply
that, of its own nature, it has no participation in any of the set and
familiar properties, but takes quality by this very non-participation,
holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off from
everything else, being as it were the negation of those others.
Deprivation, we will be told, comports quality: a blind man has the
quality of his lack of sight. If then -- it will be urged -- Matter
exhibits such a negation, surely it has a quality, all the more so,
assuming any deprivation to be a quality, in that here the deprivation
is all comprehensive.
But this notion reduces all existence to qualified things or qualities:
Quantity itself becomes a Quality and so does even Existence. Now this
cannot be: if such things as Quantity and Existence are qualified, they
are, by that very fact, not qualities: Quality is an addition to them;
we must not commit the absurdity of giving the name Quality to
something distinguishable from Quality, something therefore that is not
Quality.
Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a quality in Matter?
If this Alienism is difference-absolute [the abstract entity] it
possesses no Quality: absolute Quality cannot be itself a qualified
thing.
If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is
differentiated, then it is different not by itself [since it is
certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all
identical objects are so by virtue of Identicalness [the Absolute
principle of Identity].
An absence is neither a Quality nor a qualified entity; it is the
negation of a Quality or of something else, as noiselessness is the
negation of noise and so on. A lack is negative; Quality demands
something positive. The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the
lack of qualification and of form; surely then it is absurd to pretend
that it has Quality in not being qualified; that is like saying that
sizelessness constitutes a certain size.
The distinctive character of Matter, then, is simply its manner of
being -- not something definite inserted in it but, rather a relation
towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them.
Other things possess something besides this relation of Alienism: their
form makes each an entity. Matter may with propriety be described as
merely alien; perhaps, even, we might describe it as "The Aliens," for
the singular suggests a certain definiteness while the plural would
indicate the absence of any determination.
14. But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this
Privation is lodged?
Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in
substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from
assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in
reason from the other: that which defines Matter must be kept quite
apart from that defining the Privation and vice versa.
There are three possibilities: Matter is not in Privation and Privation
is not in Matter; or each is in each; or each is in itself alone.
Now if they should stand quite apart, neither calling for the other,
they are two distinct things: Matter is something other than Privation
even though Privation always goes with it: into the principle of the
one, the other cannot enter even potentially.
If their relation to each other is that of a snubnose to snubness, here
also there is a double concept; we have two things.
If they stand to each other as fire to heat -- heat in fire, but fire
not included in the concept of heat -- if Matter is Privation in the
way in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a form under which
Matter appears but there remains a base distinct from the Privation and
this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they are not one thing.
Perhaps the identity in substance with differentiation in reason will
be defended on the ground that Privation does not point to something
present but precisely to an absence, to something absent, to the
negation or lack of Real-being: the case would be like that of the
affirmation of non-existence, where there is no real predication but
simply a denial.
Is, then, this Privation simply a non-existence?
If a non-existence in the sense that it is not a thing of Real-being,
but belongs to some other Kind of existent, we have still two
Principles, one referring directly to the substratum, the other merely
exhibiting the relation of the Privation to other things.
Or we might say that the one concept defines the relation of substratum
to what is not substratum, while that of Privation, in bringing out the
indeterminateness of Matter, applies to the Matter in itself: but this
still makes Privation and Matter two in reason though one in
substratum.
Now if Matter possesses an identity -- though only the identity of
being indeterminate, unfixed and without quality -- how can we bring it
so under two principles?
15. The further question, therefore, is raised whether boundlessness
and indetermination are things lodging in something other than
themselves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation [or Negation of
quality] is also an attribute residing in some separate substratum.
Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is outside of
boundlessness: these bestow bound and settlement and order in general
upon all else: neither anything that has been brought under order nor
any Order-Absolute is needed to bring them under order. The thing that
has to be brought under order [e.g., Matter] is other than the Ordering
Principle which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-Principle.
Therefore, necessarily, the thing to be brought under order and to
definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking delimitation.
Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order -- like all that
shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same principle
-- therefore, necessarily, Matter is The Undelimited and not merely the
recipient of a nonessential quality of Indefiniteness entering as an
attribute.
For, first, any attribute to any subject must be a Reason-Principle;
and Indefiniteness is not a Reason-Principle.
Secondly, what must a thing be to take Indefiniteness as an attribute?
Obviously it must, beforehand, be either Definiteness or a defined
thing. But Matter is neither.
Then again Indefiniteness entering as an attribute into the definite
must cease to be indefinite: but Indefiniteness has not entered as an
attribute into Matter: that is, Matter is essentially Indefiniteness.
The
Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the Indefinite, [the
undelimited]; it must be a thing generated by the undefined nature, the
illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One illimitableness,
however, not possessing native existence There but engendered by The
One.
But how can Matter be common to both spheres, be here and be There?
Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.
But what difference can there be between phase and phase of
Indefiniteness?
The difference of archetype and image.
So that Matter here [as only an image of Indefiniteness] would be less
indefinite?
On the contrary, more indefinite as an Image-thing remote from true
being. Indefiniteness is the greater in the less ordered object; the
less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate in the
Intellectual Realm, where there is truer being, might almost be called
merely an Image of Indefiniteness: in this lower Sphere where there is
less Being, where there is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption
of the Image-Kind, Indefiniteness is more authentically indefinite.
But this argument seems to make no difference between the indefinite
object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none?
In any object in which Reason and Matter co-exist we distinguish
between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate subject: but where
Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say
right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not present;
for it is a Reason-Principle and could not lodge in the indeterminate
object without at once annulling the indeterminateness.
Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its natural
opposition to Reason-Principle. Reason is Reason and nothing else; just
so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is
Indeterminateness and nothing else.
16. Then Matter is simply Alienism [the Principle of Difference]?
No: it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction
with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-Principles. So
understood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence; for
it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing in
opposition to the things that exist in Reason.
But must not Privation cease to have existence, when what has been
lacking is present at last?
By no means: the recipient of a state or character is not a state but
the Privation of the state; and that into which determination enters is
neither a determined object nor determination itself, but simply the
wholly or partly undetermined.
Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined be annulled by the
entry of Determination, especially where this is no mere attribute?
No doubt to introduce quantitative determination into an undetermined
object would annul the original state; but in the particular case, the
introduction of determination only confirms the original state,
bringing it into actuality, into full effect, as sowing brings out the
natural quality of land or as a female organism impregnated by the male
is not defeminized but becomes more decidedly of its sex; the thing
becomes more emphatically itself.
But on this reasoning must not Matter owe its evil to having in some
degree participated in good?
No: its evil is in its first lack: it was not a possessor (of some
specific character).
To lack one thing and to possess another, in something like equal
proportions, is to hold a middle state of good and evil: but whatsoever
possesses nothing and so is in destitution -- and especially what is
essentially destitution -- must be evil in its own Kind.
For in Matter we have no mere absence of means or of strength; it is
utter destitution -- of sense, of virtue, of beauty, of pattern, of
Ideal principle, of quality. This is surely ugliness, utter
disgracefulness, unredeemed evil.
The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an Existent, for there is
nothing previous to it except the Beyond-Existence; but what precedes
the Matter of this sphere is Existence; by its alienism in regard to
the beauty and good of Existence, Matter is therefore a non-existent.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
ON POTENTIALITY AND ACTUALITY.
1. A distinction is made between things existing actually and things
existing potentially; a certain Actuality, also, is spoken of as a
really existent entity. We must consider what content there is in these
terms.
Can we distinguish between Actuality [an absolute, abstract Principle]
and the state of being-in-act? And if there is such an Actuality, is
this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct so that this actually
existent thing need not be, itself, an Act?
It is indubitable that Potentiality exists in the Realm of Sense: but
does the Intellectual Realm similarly include the potential or only the
actual? and if the potential exists there, does it remain merely
potential for ever? And, if so, is this resistance to actualization due
to its being precluded [as a member of the Divine or Intellectual
world] from time-processes?
First we must make clear what potentiality is.
We cannot think of potentiality as standing by itself; there can be no
potentiality apart from something which a given thing may be or become.
Thus bronze is the potentiality of a statue: but if nothing could be
made out of the bronze, nothing wrought upon it, if it could never be
anything as a future to what it has been, if it rejected all change, it
would be bronze and nothing else: its own character it holds already as
a present thing, and that would be the full of its capacity: it would
be destitute of potentiality. Whatsoever has a potentiality must first
have a character of its own; and its potentiality will consist in its
having a reach beyond that character to some other.
Sometimes after it has turned its potentiality into actuality it will
remain what it was; sometimes it will sink itself to the fullest extent
in the new form and itself disappear: these two different modes are
exemplified in (1) bronze as potentially a statue and (2) water [=
primal-liquid] as potentially bronze or, again, air as potentially
fire.
But if this be the significance of potentiality, may we describe it as
a Power towards the thing that is to be? Is the Bronze a power towards
a statue?
Not in the sense of an effectively productive force: such a power could
not be called a potentiality. Of course Potentiality may be a power,
as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing which may
be brought into actualization but to Actuality itself [the Principle or
Abstract in which potentiality and the power of realizing potentiality
may be thought of as identical]: but it is better, as more conducive to
clarity, to use "Potentiality" in regard to the process of
Actualization and "Power" in regard to the Principle, Actuality.
Potentiality may be thought of as a Substratum to states and shapes --
and forms which are to be received, which it welcomes by its nature and
even strives for -- sometimes in gain but sometimes, also, to loss, to
the annulling of some distinctive manner of Being already actually
achieved.
2. Then the question rises whether Matter -- potentially what it
becomes by receiving shape -- is actually something else or whether it
has no actuality at all. In general terms: When a potentiality has
taken a definite form, does it retain its being? Is the potentiality,
itself, in actualization? The alternative is that, when we speak of the
"Actual Statue" and of the "Potential Statue," the Actuality is not
predicated of the same subject as the "Potentiality." If we have really
two different subjects, then the potential does not really become the
actual: all that happens is that an actual entity takes the place of a
potential.
The actualized entity is not the Matter [the Potentiality, merely] but
a combination, including the Form-Idea upon the Matter.
This is certainly the case when a quite different thing results from
the actualization-statue, for example, the combination, is distinctly
different from the bronze, the base; where the resultant is something
quite new, the Potentiality has clearly not, itself, become what is now
actualized. But take the case where a person with a capacity for
education becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality, here,
identical with actualization? Is not the potentially wise Socrates the
same man as the Socrates actually wise?
But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge because he is so
potentially? Is he, in virtue of his non-essential ignorance,
potentially an instructed being?
It is not because of his accidental ignorance that he is a being of
Knowledge: it is because, ignorant though he be by accident, his mind,
apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may become so.
Thus, in the case of the potentially instructed who have become so in
fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual; or, if we prefer to
put it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the
other, there is the power in actual possession of the form.
If, then, the Potentiality is the Substratum while the thing in
actualization -- the Statue for example a combination, how are we to
describe the form that has entered the bronze?
There will be nothing unsound in describing this shape, this Form which
has brought the entity from potentiality to actuality, as the
actualization; but of course as the actualization of the definite
particular entity, not as Actuality the abstract: we must not confuse
it with the other actualization, strictly so called, that which is
contrasted with the power producing actualization. The potential is led
out into realization by something other than itself; power
accomplishes, of itself, what is within its scope, but by virtue of
Actuality [the abstract]: the relation is that existing between a
temperament and its expression in act, between courage and courageous
conduct. So far so good:
3. We come now to the purpose of all this discussion; to make clear in
what sense or to what degree Actualization is predicable in the
Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Actualization there, each and
every member of that realm being an Act, or whether Potentiality also
has place there.
Now: if there is no Matter there to harbour potentiality: if nothing
there has any future apart from its actual mode: if nothing there
generates, whether by changes or in the permanence of its identity; if
nothing goes outside of itself to give being to what is other than
itself; then, potentiality has no place there: the Beings there possess
actuality as belonging to eternity, not to time.
Those, however, who assert Matter in the Intellectual Realm will be
asked whether the existence of that Matter does not imply the potential
there too; for even if Matter there exists in another mode than here,
every Being there will have its Matter, its form and the union of the
two [and therefore the potential, separable from the actual]. What
answer is to be made?
Simply, that even the Matter there is Idea, just as the Soul, an Idea,
is Matter to another [a higher] Being.
But relatively to that higher, the Soul is a potentiality?
No: for the Idea [to which it is Matter] is integral to the Soul and
does not look to a future; the distinction between the Soul and its
Idea is purely mental: the Idea and the Matter it includes are
conceived as a conjunction but are essentially one Kind: remember that
Aristotle makes his Fifth Body immaterial.
But surely Potentiality exists in the Soul? Surely the Soul is
potentially the living-being of this world before it has become so? Is
it not potentially musical, and everything else that it has not been
and becomes? Does not this imply potentiality even in the Intellectual
Existences?
No: the Soul is not potentially these things; it is a Power towards
them.
But after what mode does Actualization exist in the Intellectual Realm?
Is it the Actualization of a statue, where the combination is realized
because the Form-Idea has mastered each separate constituent of the
total?
No: it is that every constituent there is a Form-Idea and, thus, is
perfect in its Being.
There is in the Intellectual Principle no progression from some power
capable of intellection to the Actuality of intellection: such a
progression would send us in search of a Prior Principle not
progressing from Power to Act; there all stands ever realized.
Potentiality requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it
to the actualization which otherwise cannot be; but what possesses, of
itself, identity unchangeable for ever is an actualization: all the
Firsts then are actualizations, simply because eternally and of
themselves they possess all that is necessary to their completion.
This applies equally to the Soul, not to that in Matter but to that in
the Intellectual Sphere; and even that in Matter, the Soul of Growth,
is an actualization in its difference; it possesses actually [and not,
like material things, merely in image] the Being that belongs to it.
Then, everything, in the intellectual is in actualization and so all
There is Actuality?
Why not? If that Nature is rightly said to be "Sleepless," and to be
Life and the noblest mode of Life, the noblest Activities must be
there; all then is actualization there, everything is an Actuality, for
everything is a Life, and all Place there is the Place of Life, in the
true sense the ground and spring of Soul and of the Intellectual
Principle.
4. Now, in general anything that has a potentiality is actually
something else, and this potentiality of the future mode of being is an
existing mode.
But what we think of as Matter, what we assert to be the potentiality
of all things, cannot be said to be actually any one being among
beings: if it were of itself any definite being, it could not be
potentially all.
If, then, it is not among existences, it must necessarily be without
existence.
How, therefore, can it be actually anything?
The answer is that while Matter can not be any of the things which are
founded upon it, it may quite well be something else, admitting that
all existences are not rooted in Matter.
But once more, if it is excluded from the entities founded upon it and
all these are Beings, it must itself be a Non-Being.
It is, further, by definition, formless and therefore not an Idea: it
cannot then be classed among things of the Intellectual Realm, and so
is, once more, a Non-Being. Falling, as regards both worlds, under
Non-Being, it is all the more decidedly the Non-Being.
It has eluded the Nature of the Authentic Existences; it has even
failed to come up with the things to which a spurious existence can be
attributed -- for it is not even a phantasm of Reason as these are --
how is it possible to include it under any mode of Being?
And if it falls under no mode of Being, what can it actually be?
5. How can we talk of it? How can it be the Matter of real things?
It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a Potentiality.
And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the order of the thing it is
to become: its existence is no more than an announcement of a future,
as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into existence.
As Potentiality then, it is not any definite thing but the potentiality
of everything: being nothing in itself -- beyond what being Matter
amounts to -- it is not in actualization. For if it were actually
something, that actualized something would not be Matter, or at least
not Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited sense in which
bronze is the matter of the statue.
And its Non-Being must be no mere difference from Being.
Motion, for example, is different from Being, but plays about it,
springing from it and living within it: Matter is, so to speak, the
outcast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeemably what it was from
the beginning: in origin it was Non-Being and so it remains.
Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at the very beginning from
the universal circle of Beings, it was thus necessarily an active
Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to
annex for itself even a visible outline from all the forms under which
it has sought to creep: it has always pursued something other than
itself; it was never more than a Potentiality towards its next: where
all the circle of Being ends, there only is it manifest; discerned
underneath things produced after it, it is remoter [from Real-Being]
even than they.
Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of Being, it can be no
actualization of either: all that is allowed to it is to be a
Potentiality, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape
of its own.
Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the actuality of being a
falsity; and the false in actualization is the veritably false, which
again is Authentic Non-Existence.
So that Matter, as the Actualization of Non-Being, is all the more
decidedly Non-Being, is Authentic Non-Existence.
Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is situated in Non-Being, it
is in no degree the Actualization of any definite Being.
If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an Actualization, for then
it would not be the stray from Authentic Being which it is, the thing
having its Being in Non-Beingness: for, note, in the case of things
whose Being is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what
Being they have, and if we introduce actualization into things whose
Being and Essence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation of their
nature since their Being is Potentiality.
If Matter is to be kept as the unchanging substratum, we must keep it
as Matter: that means -- does it not? -- that we must define it as a
Potentiality and nothing more -- or refute these considerations.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
QUALITY AND FORM-IDEA.
1. Are not Being and Reality (to on and he ousia) distinct; must we not
envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else, while Reality is
this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others -- Movement, Rest,
Identity, Difference -- so that these are the specific constituents of
Reality?
The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement, and so
on are separate constituents.
Now Movement has Being as an accident and therefore should have Reality
as an accident; or is it something serving to the completion of
Reality?
No: Movement is a Reality; everything in the Supreme is a Reality.
Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in this sphere?
In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one; ours is the
sphere of images whose separation produces grades of difference. Thus
in the spermatic unity all the human members are present
undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and hand: their
distinct existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not
Authentic Existence.
And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be explained
in the same way? Are they differing Realities centred in one Reality or
gathered round Being -- differences which constitute Realities distinct
from each other within the common fact of Reality?
This is sound enough; but it does not apply to all the qualities of
this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations of Reality
-- such as the quality of two-footedness or four-footedness -- but
others are not such differentiations of Reality and, because they are
not so, must be called qualities and nothing more.
On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a
differentiation of Reality and sometimes not -- a differentiation when
it is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other
thing, where it is not a constitutive element but an accidental. The
distinction may be seen in the [constitutive] whiteness of a swan or of
ceruse and the whiteness which in a man is an accidental.
Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form of the thing it is a
constitutive element and not a quality; where it is a superficial
appearance it is a quality.
In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a
qualification that is of the very substance of the thing, something
exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing
more, [not constituting but simply] giving some particular character to
the real thing; in this second case the qualification does not produce
any alteration towards Reality or away from it; the Reality has existed
fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which --
whether in soul or body -- merely introduces some state from outside,
and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.
But what if [the superficial appearance such as] the visible whiteness
in ceruse is constitutive? In the swan the whiteness is not
constitutive since a swan need not be white: it is constitutive in
ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of the Reality, fire.
No doubt we may be told that the Reality in fire is [not warmth but]
fieriness and in ceruse an analogous abstraction: yet the fact remains
that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is constitutive and in the
ceruse whiteness.
Thus the same entities are represented at once as being not qualities
but constituents of Reality and not constituents but qualities.
Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing changed its own
nature according to whether it is present as a constituent or as an
accidental.
The truth is that while the Reason-Principles producing these entities
contain nothing but what is of the nature of Reality, yet only in the
Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess real existence: here
they are not real; they are qualified.
And this is the starting-point of an error we constantly make: in our
enquiries into things we let realities escape us and fasten on what is
mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the
observation of certain qualities present; fire is a Reality [not a
combination of material phenomena]; the phenomena observed here and
leading us to name fire call us away from the authentic thing; a
quality is erected into the very matter of definition -- a procedure,
however, reasonable enough in regard to things of the realm of sense
which are in no case realities but accidents of Reality.
And this raises the question how Reality can ever spring from what are
not Realities.
It has been shown that a thing coming into being cannot be identical
with its origins: it must here be added that nothing thus coming into
being [no "thing of process"] can be a Reality.
Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme of what we have called
Reality from what is not Reality [i.e., from the pure Being which is
above Reality]?
The Reality there -- possessing Authentic Being in the strictest sense,
with the least admixture -- is Reality by existing among the
differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is
affirmed in the sense that with the existence of the Supreme is
included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of the
Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution; the produced
thing is deficient by the very addition, by being less simplex, by
standing one step away from the Authentic.
2. But we must enquire into Quality in itself: to know its nature is
certainly the way to settle our general question.
The first point is to assure ourselves whether or not one and the same
thing may be held to be sometimes a mere qualification and sometimes a
constituent of Reality -- not staying on the point that qualification
could not be constitutive of a Reality but of a qualified Reality only.
Now in a Reality possessing a determined quality, the Reality and the
fact of existence precede the qualified Reality.
What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality which precedes the
qualified Reality?
Its mere body, perhaps? If so, body being the Reality, fire is a warmed
body; and the total thing is not the Reality; and the fire has warmth
as a man might have a snub nose.
Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness -- all which certainly do
seem to be qualities -- and its resistance, there is left only its
extension by three dimensions: in other words, its Matter is its
Reality.
But that cannot be held: surely the form is much more likely than the
Matter to be the Reality.
But is not the Form of Quality?
No, the Form is not a Quality: it is a Reason-Principle.
And the outcome of this Reason-Principle entering into the underlying
Matter, what is that?
Certainly not what is seen and burns, for that is the something in
which these qualities inhere.
We might define the burning as an Act springing from the
Reason-Principle: then the warming and lighting and other effects of
fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its
quality.
Such completions of a Reality cannot be called qualities since they are
its Acts emanating from the Reason-Principles and from the essential
powers. A quality is something persistently outside Reality; it cannot
appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as
quality; its function is to bring in the something more after the
Reality is established, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness,
beauty, health, a certain shape. On this last, however, it may be
remarked that triangularity and quadrangularity are not in themselves
qualities, but there is quality when a thing is triangular by having
been brought to that shape; the quality is not the triangularity but
the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts and
avocations.
Thus: Quality is a condition superadded to a Reality whose existence
does not depend upon it, whether this something more be a later
acquirement or an accompaniment from the first; it is something in
whose absence the Reality would still be complete. It will sometimes
come and go, sometimes be inextricably attached, so that there are two
forms of Quality, the moveable and the fixed.
3. The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be
classed not as a quality but as an activity -- the act of a power which
can make white; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the
Intellectual Realm should be known as activities; they are activities
which to our minds take the appearance of quality from the fact that,
differing in character among themselves, each of them is a
particularity which, so to speak, distinguishes those Realities from
each other.
What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that
here, if both are Acts?
The difference is that these ["Quality-Activities"] in the Supreme do
not indicate the very nature of the Reality [as do the corresponding
Activities here] nor do they indicate variations of substance or of
[essential] character; they merely indicate what we think of as Quality
but in the Intellectual Realm must still be Activity.
In other words this thing, considered in its aspect as possessing the
characteristic property of Reality is by that alone recognised as no
mere Quality. But when our reason separates what is distinctive in
these ["Quality-Activities"] -- not in the sense of abolishing them but
rather as taking them to itself and making something new of them --
this new something is Quality: reason has, so to speak, appropriated a
portion of Reality, that portion manifest to it on the surface.
By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of the specific nature of
fire, may very well be no quality in fire but an Idea-Form belonging to
it, one of its activities, while being merely a Quality in other things
than fire: as it is manifested in any warm object, it is not a mode of
Reality but merely a trace, a shadow, an image, something that has gone
forth from its own Reality -- where it was an Act -- and in the warm
object is a quality.
All, then, that is accident and not Act; all but what is Idea-form of
the Reality; all that merely confers pattern; all this is Quality:
qualities are characteristics and modes other than those constituting
the substratum of a thing.
But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the foundation in which they
exist primarily, these are Activities of the Intellectual Beings.
And; one and the same thing cannot be both Quality and non-quality: the
thing void of Real-Existence is Quality; but the thing accompanying
Reality is either Form or Activity: there is no longer self-identity
when, from having its being in itself, anything comes to be in
something else with a fall from its standing as Form and Activity.
Finally, anything which is never Form but always accidental to
something else is Quality unmixed and nothing more.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
ON COMPLETE TRANSFUSION.
1. Some enquiry must be made into what is known as the complete
transfusion of material substances.
Is it possible that fluid be blended with fluid in such a way that each
penetrate the other through and through? or -- a difference of no
importance if any such penetration occurs -- that one of them pass
completely through the other?
Those that admit only contact need not detain us. They are dealing with
mixture, not with the coalescence which makes the total a thing of like
parts, each minutest particle being composed of all the combined
elements.
But there are those who, admitting coalescence, confine it to the
qualities: to them the material substances of two bodies are in contact
merely, but in this contact of the matter they find footing for the
qualities of each.
Their view is plausible because it rejects the notion of total
admixture and because it recognizes that the masses of the mixing
bodies must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap,
if, that is to say, each substance must be divided within itself
through and through for complete interpenetration with the other. Their
theory is confirmed by the cases in which two mixed substances occupy a
greater space than either singly, especially a space equal to the
conjoined extent of each: for, as they point out, in an absolute
interpenetration the infusion of the one into the other would leave the
occupied space exactly what it was before and, where the space occupied
is not increased by the juxtaposition, they explain that some expulsion
of air has made room for the incoming substance. They ask further, how
a minor quantity of one substance can be spread out so as to
interpenetrate a major quantity of another. In fact they have a
multitude of arguments.
Those, on the other hand, that accept "complete transfusion," might
object that it does not require the reduction of the mixed things to
fragments, a certain cleavage being sufficient: thus, for instance,
sweat does not split up the body or even pierce holes in it. And if it
is answered that this may well be a special decree of Nature to allow
of the sweat exuding, there is the case of those manufactured articles,
slender but without puncture, in which we can see a liquid wetting them
through and through so that it runs down from the upper to the under
surface. How can this fact be explained, since both the liquid and the
solid are bodily substances? Interpenetration without disintegration is
difficult to conceive, and if there is such mutual disintegration the
two must obviously destroy each other.
When they urge that often there is a mixing without augmentation their
adversaries can counter at once with the exit of air.
When there is an increase in the space occupied, nothing refutes the
explanation -- however unsatisfying -- that this is a necessary
consequence of two bodies bringing to a common stock their magnitude
equally with their other attributes: size is as permanent as any other
property; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities there results
a new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new
magnitude; the blending gives us a magnitude representing each of the
two. But at this point the others will answer, "If you mean that
substance lies side by side with substance and mass with mass, each
carrying its quantum of magnitude, you are at one with us: if there
were complete transfusion, one substance sinking its original magnitude
in the other, we would have no longer the case of two lines joined end
to end by their terminal points and thus producing an increased
extension; we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore,
no increase."
But a lesser quantity permeates the entire extent of a larger; the
smallest is sunk in the greatest; transfusion is exhibited
unmistakably. In certain cases it is possible to pretend that there is
no total penetration but there are manifest examples leaving no room
for the pretence. In what they say of the spreading out of masses they
cannot be thought very plausible; the extension would have to be
considerable indeed in the case of a very small quantity [to be in true
mixture with a very large mass]; for they do not suggest any such
extension by change as that of water into air.
2. This, however, raises a problem deserving investigation in itself:
what has happened when a definite magnitude of water becomes air, and
how do we explain the increase of volume? But for the present we must
be content with the matter thus far discussed out of all the varied
controversy accumulated on either side.
It remains for us to make out on our own account the true explanation
of the phenomenon of mixing, without regard to the agreement or
disagreement of that theory with any of the current opinions mentioned.
When water runs through wool or when papyrus-pulp gives up its moisture
why is not the moist content expressed to the very last drop or even,
without question of outflow, how can we possibly think that in a
mixture the relation of matter with matter, mass with mass, is contact
and that only the qualities are fused? The pulp is not merely in touch
with water outside it or even in its pores; it is wet through and
through so that every particle of its matter is drenched in that
quality. Now if the matter is soaked all through with the quality, then
the water is everywhere in the pulp.
"Not the water; the quality of the water."
But then, where is the water? and [if only a quality has entered] why
is there a change of volume? The pulp has been expanded by the
addition: that is to say it has received magnitude from the incoming
substance but if it has received the magnitude, magnitude has been
added; and a magnitude added has not been absorbed; therefore the
combined matter must occupy two several places. And as the two mixing
substances communicate quality and receive matter in mutual give and
take so they may give and take magnitude. Indeed when a quality meets
another quality it suffers some change; it is mixed, and by that
admixture it is no longer pure and therefore no longer itself but a
blunter thing, whereas magnitude joining magnitude retains its full
strength.
But let it be understood how we came to say that body passing through
and through another body must produce disintegration, while we make
qualities pervade their substances without producing disintegration:
the bodilessness of qualities is the reason. Matter, too, is bodiless:
it may, then, be supposed that as Matter pervades everything so the
bodiless qualities associated with it -- as long as they are few --
have the power of penetration without disintegration. Anything solid
would be stopped either in virtue of the fact that a solid has the
precise quality which forbids it to penetrate or in that the mere
coexistence of too many qualities in Matter [constitutes density and
so] produces the same inhibition.
If, then, what we call a dense body is so by reason of the presence of
many qualities, that plenitude of qualities will be the cause [of the
inhibition].
If on the other hand density is itself a quality like what they call
corporeity, then the cause will be that particular quality.
This would mean that the qualities of two substances do not bring about
the mixing by merely being qualities but by being apt to mixture; nor
does Matter refuse to enter into a mixing as Matter but as being
associated with a quality repugnant to mixture; and this all the more
since it has no magnitude of its own but only does not reject
magnitude.
3. We have thus covered our main ground, but since corporeity has been
mentioned, we must consider its nature: is it the conjunction of all
the qualities or is it an Idea, or Reason-Principle, whose presence in
Matter constitutes a body?
Now if body is the compound, the thing made up of all the required
qualities plus Matter, then corporeity is nothing more than their
conjunction.
And if it is a Reason-Principle, one whose incoming constitutes the
body, then clearly this Principle contains embraced within itself all
the qualities. If this Reason-Principle is to be no mere principle of
definition exhibiting the nature of a thing but a veritable Reason
constituting the thing, then it cannot itself contain Matter but must
encircle Matter, and by being present to Matter elaborate the body:
thus the body will be Matter associated with an indwelling
Reason-Principle which will be in itself immaterial, pure Idea, even
though irremoveably attached to the body. It is not to be confounded
with that other Principle in man -- treated elsewhere -- which dwells
in the Intellectual World by right of being itself an Intellectual
Principle.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
WHY DISTANT OBJECTS APPEAR SMALL.
1. Seen from a distance, objects appear reduced and close together,
however far apart they be: within easy range, their sizes and the
distances that separate them are observed correctly.
Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn
together for vision and the light must be concentrated to suit the size
of the pupil; besides, as we are placed farther and farther away from
the material mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form
that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other
quality.
Or it may be that we appreciate the magnitude of an object by observing
the salience and recession of its several parts, so that to perceive
its true size we must have it close at hand.
Or again, it may be that magnitude is known incidentally [as a
deduction] from the observation of colour. With an object at hand we
know how much space is covered by the colour; at a distance, only that
something is coloured, for the parts, quantitatively distinct among
themselves, do not give us the precise knowledge of that quantity, the
colours themselves reaching us only in a blurred impression.
What wonder, then, if size be like sound -- reduced when the form
reaches us but faintly -- for in sound the hearing is concerned only
about the form; magnitude is not discerned except incidentally.
Well, in hearing magnitude is known incidentally; but how? Touch
conveys a direct impression of a visible object; what gives us the same
direct impression of an object of hearing?
The magnitude of a sound is known not by actual quantity but by degree
of impact, by intensity -- and this in no indirect knowledge; the ear
appreciates a certain degree of force, exactly as the palate perceives
by no indirect knowledge, a certain degree of sweetness. But the true
magnitude of a sound is its extension; this the hearing may define to
itself incidentally by deduction from the degree of intensity but not
to the point of precision. The intensity is merely the definite effect
at a particular spot; the magnitude is a matter of totality, the sum of
space occupied.
Still the colours seen from a distance are faint; but they are not
small as the masses are.
True; but there is the common fact of diminution. There is colour with
its diminution, faintness; there is magnitude with its diminution,
smallness; and magnitude follows colour diminishing stage by stage with
it.
But, the phenomenon is more easily explained by the example of things
of wide variety. Take mountains dotted with houses, woods and other
land-marks; the observation of each detail gives us the means of
calculating, by the single objects noted, the total extent covered:
but, where no such detail of form reaches us, our vision, which deals
with detail, has not the means towards the knowledge of the whole by
measurement of any one clearly discerned magnitude. This applies even
to objects of vision close at hand: where there is variety and the eye
sweeps over all at one glance so that the forms are not all caught, the
total appears the less in proportion to the detail which has escaped
the eye; observe each single point and then you can estimate the volume
precisely. Again, magnitudes of one colour and unbroken form trick the
sense of quantity: the vision can no longer estimate by the particular;
it slips away, not finding the stand-by of the difference between part
and part.
It was the detail that prevented a near object deceiving our sense of
magnitude: in the case of the distant object, because the eye does not
pass stage by stage through the stretch of intervening space so as to
note its forms, therefore it cannot report the magnitude of that space.
2. The explanation by lesser angle of vision has been elsewhere
dismissed; one point, however, we may urge here.
Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied
allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye still
sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of
vision, if only air-space.
Now consider some very large object of vision, that mountain for
example. No part of the eye is unoccupied; the mountain adequately
fills it so that it can take in nothing beyond, for the mountain as
seen either corresponds exactly to the eye-space or stretches away out
of range to right and to left. How does the explanation by lesser angle
of vision hold good in this case, where the object still appears
smaller, far, than it is and yet occupies the eye entire?
Or look up to the sky and no hesitation can remain. Of course we cannot
take in the entire hemisphere at one glance; the eye directed to it
could not cover so vast an expanse. But suppose the possibility: the
entire eye, then, embraces the hemisphere entire; but the expanse of
the heavens is far greater than it appears; how can its appearing far
less than it is be explained by a lessening of the angle of vision?
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF THE KOSMOS AND
THE KOSMOS ITSELF TO BE EVIL: [GENERALLY QUOTED
AS "AGAINST THE GNOSTICS"].
1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex,
and, correspondingly, primal -- for the secondary can never be simplex
-- that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity.
Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. just
as the goodness of The Good is essential and not the outgrowth of some
prior substance so the Unity of The One is its essential.
Therefore:
When we speak of The One and when we speak of The Good we must
recognize an Identical Nature; we must affirm that they are the same --
not, it is true, as venturing any predication with regard to that
[unknowable] Hypostasis but simply as indicating it to ourselves in the
best terms we find.
Even in calling it "The First" we mean no more than to express that it
is the most absolutely simplex: it is the Self-Sufficing only in the
sense that it is not of that compound nature which would make it
dependent upon any constituent; it is "the Self-Contained" because
everything contained in something alien must also exist by that alien.
Deriving, then, from nothing alien, entering into nothing alien, in no
way a made-up thing, there can be nothing above it.
We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles; this -- the One and
the Good -- is our First; next to it follows the Intellectual
Principle, the Primal Thinker; and upon this follows Soul. Such is the
order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and
no fewer.
Those who hold to fewer Principles must hold the identity of either
Intellectual-Principle and Soul or of Intellectual-Principle and The
First; but we have abundantly shown that these are distinct.
It remains for us to consider whether there are more than these Three.
Now what other [Divine] Kinds could there be? No Principles of the
universe could be found at once simpler and more transcendent than this
whose existence we have affirmed and described.
They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by
a Principle in Potentiality. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by
distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of
immaterial beings whose existence is in Act -- even in lower forms no
such division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the
Intellectual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all
astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual
Principle as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the
quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the others?
No: the Intellectual-Principle is continuously itself, unchangeably
constituted in stable Act. With movement -- towards it or within it --
we are in the realm of the Soul's operation: such act is a
Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an
Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle
to stand between the two.
Nor are we warranted in affirming a plurality of Intellectual
Principles on the ground that there is one that knows and thinks and
another knowing that it knows and thinks. For whatever distinction be
possible in the Divine between its Intellectual Act and its
Consciousness of that Act, still all must be one projection not unaware
of its own operation: it would be absurd to imagine any such
unconsciousness in the Authentic Intelligence; the knowing principle
must be one and the selfsame with that which knows of the knowing.
The contrary supposition would give us two beings, one that merely
knows, and another separate being that knows of the act of knowing.
If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our
thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in the Divine
Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our
thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as
not to know that it knows -- a limitation which would be charged as
imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force
are always master of our emotions and mental processes.
No: The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of the
thought is nothing external: Thinker and Thought are one; therefore in
its thinking and knowing it possesses itself, observes itself and sees
itself not as something unconscious but as knowing: in this Primal
Knowing it must include, as one and the same Act, the knowledge of the
knowing; and even the logical distinction mentioned above cannot be
made in the case of the Divine; the very eternity of its self-thinking
precludes any such separation between that intellective act and the
consciousness of the act.
The absurdity becomes still more blatant if we introduce yet a further
distinction -- after that which affirms the knowledge of the knowing, a
third distinction affirming the knowing of the knowledge of the
knowing: yet there is no reason against carrying on the division for
ever and ever.
To increase the Primals by making the Supreme Mind engender the
Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power
to act as mediator between Soul and the Supreme Mind, this is to deny
intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from
the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then
would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul
could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no
intellection.
2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are
not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects.
We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in
no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature
allows, of the Father.
And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always
in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned
with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It
is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety
is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent;
sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul
with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.
The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the
perfect Beauty -- the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is
no part and of which we too are no part -- thence to pour forth into
the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty.
There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or
policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous
efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.
For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its
grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it
communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.
3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it
to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained
and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can
absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive
body within range.
Our fire, however, is a thing of limited scope: given powers that have
no limitation and are never cut off from the Authentic Existences, how
imagine anything existing and yet failing to receive from them?
It is of the essence of things that each gives of its being to another:
without this communication, The Good would not be Good, nor the
Intellectual-Principle an Intellective Principle, nor would Soul itself
be what it is: the law is, "some life after the Primal Life, a second
where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal;
divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary."
In other words, things commonly described as generated have never known
a beginning: all has been and will be. Nor can anything disappear
unless where a later form is possible: without such a future there can
be no dissolution.
If we are told that there is always Matter as a possible term, we ask
why then should not Matter itself come to nothingness. If we are told
it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the
answer comes that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the
series, we return that the necessity still holds.
With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not
everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to speak; if that
is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine light [and so
cannot be annihilated].
4. To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the
failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake
the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us
also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If from
eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some
one moment, why not before that?
We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of
its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist only in its forgetting
the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it
create but from the things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from
the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in
some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to
decline: any inclination would be towards its Prior, in an effort to
the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire
could it have than to retrace the way?
What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating? Glory? That
would be absurd -- a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.
Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its
nature, by being characteristically the creative power -- how explain
the making of this universe?
And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is
it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent:
it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender
towards it with the passing of time.
Can it be waiting for certain souls still here? Long since would these
have ceased returning for such re-birth, having known in former life
the evils of this sphere; long since would they have foreborne to come.
Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy origin because there are
many jarring things in it. Such a judgement would rate it too high,
treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely its
reflection.
And yet -- what reflection of that world could be conceived more
beautiful than this of ours? What fire could be a nobler reflection of
the fire there than the fire we know here? Or what other earth than
this could have been modelled after that earth? And what globe more
minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered in its course
could have been conceived in the image of the self-centred circling of
the World of Intelligibles? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere,
if it is to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it
must be.
5. Still more unreasonably:
There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief,
anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare
themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the
sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder,
to change; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late born,
hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth.
Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare
deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within the
heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though these
are far purer and lovelier than their own souls -- yet they are not
blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in
the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder
that troubles our earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing
of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler
to the Soul that is to die.
Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which
they piece together from the elements.
How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the
elements? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or an
intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.
Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements
together when it is a later thing and rises from them? And this element
-- soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest
-- what can we think?
Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and
this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for them into
which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the
Reason-Form [the Logos] of our world. Why should they desire to live in
the archetype of a world abhorrent to them?
Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world? It would appear,
from the theory, that the Maker had already declined towards the things
of this sphere before that pattern came into being.
Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an Intermediate
World -- though what motive could He have? -- in addition to the
Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the
mid-world first, what end was it to serve?
To be a dwelling-place for Souls?
How then did they ever fall from it? It exists in vain.
If He made it later than this world -- abstracting the formal-idea of
this world and leaving the Matter out -- the Souls that have come to
know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep
them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit
the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there distinctive in the
teaching?
6. And, what are we to think of the new forms of being they introduce
-- their "Exiles" and "Impressions" and "Repentings"?
If all comes to states of the Soul -- "Repentance" when it has
undergone a change of purpose; "Impressions" when it contemplates not
the Authentic Existences but their simulacra -- there is nothing here
but a jargon invented to make a case for their school: all this
terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt to the ancient Greek
philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the ascent from
the cave and the gradual advance of souls to a truer and truer vision.
For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes from Plato; all the
novelties through which they seek to establish a philosophy of their
own have been picked up outside of the truth.
From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and
the changing from body to body; as for the plurality they assert in the
Intellectual Realm -- the Authentic Existent, the
Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul -- all this is
taken over from the Timaeus, where we read:
"As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the
Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained
in this All."
Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively
including within itself all that has being, another mind, a distinct
existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe -- though
often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating
Principle -- and they think that this third being is the Creator
according to Plato.
They are in fact quite outside of the truth in their identification of
the Creator.
In every way they misrepresent Plato's theory as to the method of
creation as in many other respects they dishonour his teaching: they,
we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature, while
Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed.
They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by
setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in reality this
multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the
Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least
possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second
Hypostasis -- which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and
Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first
Nature -- and to recognize Soul as the third Principle, accounting for
the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and
character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should
receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and
honour all that noble system -- an immortal soul, an Intellectual and
Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul's need of emancipation
from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the
escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These
doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt:
where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but
not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting
the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must
establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with
courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted
opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not
hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to
replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.
As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far
the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught
in the delusions that beset humanity: it is easy also to identify what
has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with
incongruous novelties -- how for example, where they must set up a
contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and
destruction, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul
blameable for the association with body, how they revile the
Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified
with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial be
beings.
7. That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as
long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before
this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no
gain to a Soul.
But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the
Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them
warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city.
We must recognize how different is the governance exercised by the
All-Soul; the relation is not the same: it is not in fetters. Among the
very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked
that the We [the human Soul] lies under fetter; and this in a second
limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul,
imprisons all that it grasps.
But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has
bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over
which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed
to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering;
that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to
itself. It is the general fact that an inset [as the Body], necessarily
shares the conditions of its containing principle [as the Soul], and
does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an
independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the
stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire
within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist
still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no
difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan
of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a
Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.
The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single,
separate forms of life: there, the established rule commanding to
permanence is sovereign; here things are like deserters kept to their
own place and duty by a double bond; there is no outlet from the All,
and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to
bounds: all remains where from the beginning the Soul's nature
appointed.
The natural movement within the plan will be injurious to anything
whose natural tendency it opposes: one group will sweep bravely onward
with the great total to which it is adapted; the others, not able to
comply with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving
to its concerted plan; midway in the march, a tortoise is intercepted;
unable to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot; but
if it could only range itself within the greater movement it too would
suffer nothing.
8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a
Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also, implies a beginning
in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a
changeful Being who turns from this to that.
Those that so think must be instructed -- if they would but bear with
correction -- in the nature of the Supernals, and brought to desist
from that blasphemy of majestic powers which comes so easily to them,
where all should be reverent scruple.
Even in the administration of the Universe there is no ground for such
attack, for it affords manifest proof of the greatness of the
Intellectual Kind.
This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure -- like
those lesser forms within it which are born night and day out of the
lavishness of its vitality -- the Universe is a life organized,
effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable
wisdom. How, then, can anyone deny that it is a clear image,
beautifully formed, of the Intellectual Divinities? No doubt it is
copy, not original; but that is its very nature; it cannot be at once
symbol and reality. But to say that it is an inadequate copy is false;
nothing has been left out which a beautiful representation within the
physical order could include.
Such a reproduction there must necessarily be -- though not by
deliberation and contrivance -- for the Intellectual could not be the
last of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself and one
outgoing; there must, then, be something later than the Divine; for
only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards
something of itself. In the Supreme there flourishes a marvellous
vigour, and therefore it produces.
Since there is no Universe nobler than this, is it not clear what this
must be? A representation carrying down the features of the
Intellectual Realm is necessary; there is no other Kosmos than this;
therefore this is such a representation.
This earth of ours is full of varied life-forms and of immortal beings;
to the very heavens it is crowded. And the stars, those of the upper
and the under spheres, moving in their ordered path, fellow-travellers
with the universe, how can they be less than gods? Surely they must be
morally good: what could prevent them? All that occasions vice here
below is unknown there evil of body, perturbed and perturbing.
Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace, what hinders them from the
intellectual grasp of the God-Head and the Intellectual Gods? What can
be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the Supernals?
Could anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such an idea?
Admitting that human Souls have descended under constraint of the
All-Soul, are we to think the constrained the nobler? Among Souls, what
commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was
unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit
if you dislike it?
And further, if the order of this Universe is such that we are able,
within it, to practise wisdom and to live our earthly course by the
Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine?
9. Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of that order, are made
ground of complaint. But this is to ignore that the Sage demands no
equality in such matters: he cannot think that to own many things is to
be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple; he leaves
all such preoccupations to another kind of man. He has learned that
life on earth has two distinct forms, the way of the Sage and the way
of the mass, the Sage intent upon the sublimest, upon the realm above,
while those of the more strictly human type fall, again, under two
classes, the one reminiscent of virtue and therefore not without touch
with good, the other mere populace, serving to provide necessaries to
the better sort.
But what of murder? What of the feebleness that brings men under
slavery to the passions?
Is it any wonder that there should be failing and error, not in the
highest, the intellectual, Principle but in Souls that are like
undeveloped children? And is not life justified even so if it is a
training ground with its victors and its vanquished?
You are wronged; need that trouble an immortal? You are put to death;
you have attained your desire. And from the moment your citizenship of
the world becomes irksome you are not bound to it.
Our adversaries do not deny that even here there is a system of law and
penalty: and surely we cannot in justice blame a dominion which awards
to every one his due, where virtue has its honour, and vice comes to
its fitting shame, in which there are not merely representations of the
gods, but the gods themselves, watchers from above, and -- as we read
-- easily rebutting human reproaches, since they lead all things in
order from a beginning to an end, allotting to each human being, as
life follows life, a fortune shaped to all that has preceded -- the
destiny which, to those that do not penetrate it, becomes the matter of
boorish insolence upon things divine.
A man's one task is to strive towards making himself perfect -- though
not in the idea -- really fatal to perfection -- that to be perfect is
possible to himself alone.
We must recognize that other men have attained the heights of goodness;
we must admit the goodness of the celestial spirits, and above all of
the gods -- those whose presence is here but their contemplation in the
Supreme, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most blessed
Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the divinities of the Intellectual
Sphere, and, above all these, the mighty King of that dominion, whose
majesty is made patent in the very multitude of the gods.
It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity but by displaying its
exuberance -- as the Supreme himself has displayed it -- that we show
knowledge of the might of God, who, abidingly what He is, yet creates
that multitude, all dependent on Him, existing by Him and from Him.
This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to Him -- the Universe as a
whole and every God within it -- and tells of Him to men, all alike
revealing the plan and will of the Supreme.
These, in the nature of things, cannot be what He is, but that does not
justify you in contempt of them, in pushing yourself forward as not
inferior to them.
The more perfect the man, the more compliant he is, even towards his
fellows; we must temper our importance, not thrusting insolently beyond
what our nature warrants; we must allow other beings, also, their place
in the presence of the Godhead; we may not set ourselves alone next
after the First in a dream-flight which deprives us of our power of
attaining identity with the Godhead in the measure possible to the
human Soul, that is to say, to the point of likeness to which the
Intellectual-Principle leads us; to exalt ourselves above the
Intellectual-Principle is to fall from it.
Yet imbeciles are found to accept such teaching at the mere sound of
the words "You, yourself, are to be nobler than all else, nobler than
men, nobler than even gods." Human audacity is very great: a man once
modest, restrained and simple hears, "You, yourself, are the child of
God; those men whom you used to venerate, those beings whose worship
they inherit from antiquity, none of these are His children; you
without lifting a hand are nobler than the very heavens"; others take
up the cry: the issue will be much as if in a crowd all equally
ignorant of figures, one man were told that he stands a thousand cubic
feet; he will naturally accept his thousand cubits even though the
others present are said to measure only five cubits; he will merely
tell himself that the thousand indicates a considerable figure.
Another point: God has care for you; how then can He be indifferent to
the entire Universe in which you exist?
We may be told that He is too much occupied to look upon the Universe,
and that it would not be right for Him to do so; yet, when He looks
down and upon these people, is He not looking outside Himself and upon
the Universe in which they exist? If He cannot look outside Himself so
as to survey the Kosmos, then neither does He look upon them.
But they have no need of Him?
The Universe has need of Him, and He knows its ordering and its
indwellers and how far they belong to it and how far to the Supreme,
and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing
with the Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some
pain must be brought to them -- for we are to look not to the single
will of any man but to the universe entire, regarding every one
according to worth but not stopping for such things where all that may
is hastening onward.
Not one only kind of being is bent upon this quest, which brings bliss
to whatsoever achieves, and earns for the others a future destiny in
accord with their power. No man, therefore, may flatter himself that he
alone is competent; a pretension is not a possession; many boast though
fully conscious of their lack and many imagine themselves to possess
what was never theirs and even to be alone in possessing what they
alone of men never had.
10. Under detailed investigation, many other tenets of this school --
indeed we might say all -- could be corrected with an abundance of
proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our own friends who fell
in with this doctrine before joining our circle and, strangely, still
cling to it.
The school, no doubt, is free-spoken enough -- whether in the set
purpose of giving its opinions a plausible colour of verity or in
honest belief -- but we are addressing here our own acquaintances, not
those people with whom we could make no way. We have spoken in the hope
of preventing our friends from being perturbed by a party which brings,
not proof -- how could it? -- but arbitrary, tyrannical assertion;
another style of address would be applicable to such as have the
audacity to flout the noble and true doctrines of the august teachers
of antiquity.
That method we will not apply; anyone that has fully grasped the
preceding discussion will know how to meet every point in the system.
Only one other tenet of theirs will be mentioned before passing the
matter; it is one which surpasses all the rest in sheer folly, if that
is the word.
They first maintain that the Soul and a certain "Wisdom" [Sophia]
declined and entered this lower sphere though they leave us in doubt of
whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or
whether the two are the same to them -- then they tell us that the
other Souls came down in the descent and that these members of Sophia
took to themselves bodies, human bodies, for example.
Yet in the same breath, that very Soul which was the occasion of
descent to the others is declared not to have descended. "It knew no
decline," but merely illuminated the darkness in such a way that an
image of it was formed upon the Matter. Then, they shape an image of
that image somewhere below -- through the medium of Matter or of
Materiality or whatever else of many names they choose to give it in
their frequent change of terms, invented to darken their doctrine --
and so they bring into being what they call the Creator or Demiurge,
then this lower is severed from his Mother [Sophia] and becomes the
author of the Kosmos down to the latest of the succession of images
constituting it.
Such is the blasphemy of one of their writers.
11. Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but
has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be said to have
declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light does
not justify the assertion of its decline; for that, it must make an
actual movement towards the object lying in the lower realm and
illuminate it by contact.
If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates
the lower without directing any act towards that end, why should it
alone be the illuminant? Why should not the Kosmos draw light also from
the yet greater powers contained in the total of existence?
Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a Universe, and by virtue of
this plan illuminates it, why do not that illumination and the creating
of the world take place simultaneously? Why must the Soul wait till the
representations of the plan be made actual?
Then again this Plan -- the "Far Country" of their terminology --
brought into being, as they hold, by the greater powers, could not have
been the occasion of decline to the creators.
Further, how explain that under this illumination the Matter of the
Kosmos produces images of the order of Soul instead of mere
bodily-nature? An image of Soul could not demand darkness or Matter,
but wherever formed it would exhibit the character of the producing
element and remain in close union with it.
Next, is this image a real-being, or, as they say, an Intellection?
If it is a reality, in what way does it differ from its original? By
being a distinct form of the Soul? But then, since the original is the
reasoning Soul, this secondary form must be the vegetative and
generative Soul; and then, what becomes of the theory that it is
produced for glory's sake, what becomes of the creation in arrogance
and self-assertion? The theory puts an end also to creation by
representation and, still more decidedly, to any thinking in the act;
and what need is left for a creator creating by way of Matter and
Image?
If it is an Intellection, then we ask first "What justifies the name?"
and next, "How does anything come into being unless the Soul give this
Intellection creative power and how, after all, can creative power
reside in a created thing?" Are we to be told that it is a question of
a first Image followed by a second? But this is quite arbitrary.
And why is fire the first creation?
12. And how does this image set to its task immediately after it comes
into being?
By memory of what it has seen?
But it was utterly non-existent, it could have no vision, either it or
the Mother they bestow upon it.
Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as Soul-Images but
as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of them
are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do
attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of
the Sphere they once knew: on the other hand, this Image, a new-comer
into being, is able, they tell us -- as also is its Mother -- to form
at least some dim representation of the celestial world. It is an
Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the
Supreme and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what
elements serve the purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire
before anything else? What made it judge fire a better first than some
other object?
Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of fire, why
did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking of the Universe?
It must have conceived the product complete from the first; the
constituent elements would be embraced in that general conception.
The creation must have been in all respects more according to the way
of Nature than to that of the arts -- for the arts are of later origin
than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present stage the partial
things brought into being by the natural Kinds do not follow any such
order -- first fire, then the several other elements, then the various
blends of these -- on the contrary the living organism entire is
encompassed and rounded off within the uterine germ. Why should not the
material of the Universe be similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in
which earth, fire and the rest would be included? We can only suppose
that these people themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul,
would have produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator
had not wit to do so.
And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens -- to be great in that
degree -- to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling path
of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this earth of ours -- and
all in such a way that reason can be given for the plan -- this could
never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power [the All-Soul]
next to the very Highest Beings.
Against their will, they themselves admit this: their "outshining upon
the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted, makes it impossible to deny
the true origins of the Kosmos.
Why should this down-shining take place unless such a process belonged
to a universal law?
Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that order. If
it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place from eternity;
if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right
exists in the Supreme also; evil antedates this world; the cause of
evil is not the world; on the contrary the Supreme is the evil to us;
instead of the Soul's harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere
harmed by the Soul.
In fine, the theory amounts to making the world one of the Primals, and
with it the Matter from which it emerges.
The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the already
existent Darkness. Now whence came that Darkness?
If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its Decline,
then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to decline to; the
cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the very nature of the
Soul. The theory, therefore, refers the entire process to pre-existing
compulsions: the guilt inheres in the Primal Beings.
13. Those, then, that censure the constitution of the Kosmos do not
understand what they are doing or where this audacity leads them. They
do not understand that there is a successive order of Primals,
Secondaries, Tertiaries and so on continuously to the Ultimates; that
nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First; that we can
but accept, meekly, the constitution of the total, and make our best
way towards the Primals, withdrawing from the tragic spectacle, as they
see it, of the Kosmic spheres -- which in reality are all suave
graciousness.
And what, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which
it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to thinking, never trained
in an instructive and coherent gnosis?
Even the fact that their material frame is of fire does not make them
dreadful; their Movements are in keeping with the All and with the
Earth: but what we must consider in them is the Soul, that on which
these people base their own title to honour.
And, yet, again, their material frames are pre-eminent in vastness and
beauty, as they cooperate in act and in influence with the entire order
of Nature, and can never cease to exist as long as the Primals stand;
they enter into the completion of the All of which they are major
Parts.
If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose
office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to serve towards beauty
and order. The action attributed to them must be understood as a
foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is
due, in part to diverse destinies -- for there cannot be one lot for
the entire body of men -- in part to the birth moment, in part to wide
divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls.
Once more, we have no right to ask that all men shall be good, or to
rush into censure because such universal virtue is not possible: this
would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the Supreme
and treating evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom -- as good
lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out; it would
be like calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not
Sense-Perception and the thing of sense evil for not being a
Reason-Principle. If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to
admit evil in the Supreme also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted
than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior.
14. In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the
inviolability of the Supreme.
In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the
Supernal Beings -- not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents --
they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the
idea that these Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from
any of us who is in some degree trained to use the appropriate forms in
the appropriate way -- certain melodies, certain sounds, specially
directed breathings, sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed
magic potency upon the Supreme. Perhaps they would repudiate any such
intention: still they must explain how these things act upon the
unembodied: they do not see that the power they attribute to their own
words is so much taken away from the majesty of the divine.
They tell us they can free themselves of diseases.
If they meant, by temperate living and an appropriate regime, they
would be right and in accordance with all sound knowledge. But they
assert diseases to be Spirit-Beings and boast of being able to expel
them by formula: this pretension may enhance their importance with the
crowd, gaping upon the powers of magicians; but they can never persuade
the intelligent that disease arises otherwise than from such causes as
overstrain, excess, deficiency, putrid decay; in a word, some variation
whether from within or from without.
The nature of illness is indicated by its very cure. A motion, a
medicine, the letting of blood, and the disease shifts down and away;
sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system: presumably the
Spiritual power gets hungry or is debilitated by the purge. Either this
Spirit makes a hasty exit or it remains within. If it stays, how does
the disease disappear, with the cause still present? If it quits the
place, what has driven it out? Has anything happened to it? Are we to
suppose it throve on the disease? In that case the disease existed as
something distinct from the Spirit-Power. Then again, if it steps in
where no cause of sickness exists, why should there be anything else
but illness? If there must be such a cause, the Spirit is unnecessary:
that cause is sufficient to produce that fever. As for the notion, that
just when the cause presents itself, the watchful Spirit leaps to
incorporate itself with it, this is simply amusing.
But the manner and motive of their teaching have been sufficiently
exhibited; and this was the main purpose of the discussion here upon
their Spirit-Powers. I leave it to yourselves to read the books and
examine the rest of the doctrine: you will note all through how our
form of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character and honest
thinking in addition to all other good qualities, how it cultivates
reverence and not arrogant self-assertion, how its boldness is balanced
by reason, by careful proof, by cautious progression, by the utmost
circumspection -- and you will compare those other systems to one
proceeding by this method. You will find that the tenets of their
school have been huddled together under a very different plan: they do
not deserve any further examination here.
15. There is, however, one matter which we must on no account overlook
-- the effect of these teachings upon the hearers led by them into
despising the world and all that is in it.
There are two theories as to the attainment of the End of life. The one
proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure, as the term; the other pronounces
for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and moves, by
ways to be studied elsewhere, towards God.
Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends pleasure and its enjoyment,
all that is left to us: but the doctrine under discussion is still more
wanton; it carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence; it scorns
every law known to us; immemorial virtue and all restraint it makes
into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth; it cuts at
the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which, innate
in the moral sense, is made perfect by thought and by self-discipline:
all that would give us a noble human being is gone. What is left for
them except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching
-- comes to pleasure, self-seeking, the grudge of any share with one's
fellows, the pursuit of advantage.
Their error is that they know nothing good here: all they care for is
something else to which they will at some future time apply themselves:
yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the
starting-point of the pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine
nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction.
The understanding of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning
the delight of the body, and those that have no part in well-doing can
make no step towards the Supernal.
This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of
virtue: any discussion of such matters is missing utterly: we are not
told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is
no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have
come down to us from the ancients; we do not learn what constitutes it
or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For
to say "Look to God" is not helpful without some instruction as to what
this looking imports: it might very well be said that one can "look"
and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse,
repeating the word God but held in the grip of every passion and making
no effort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked
with thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest: God on the lips,
without a good conduct of life, is a word.
16. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods within it
or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to goodness.
Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods; and one not previously
corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not
wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very fact.
Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the
honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an
inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of
the beloved; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now
every Soul is a child of that Father; but in the heavenly bodies there
are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than
are ours; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how
imagine the gods in it to stand apart?
But of this matter we have treated elsewhere: here we urge that where
there is contempt for the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge of the
Supreme itself is merely verbal.
What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly concerns
or set any limit whatsoever to it?
And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to
assert that Providence cares for them, though for them alone?
And is this Providence over them to be understood of their existence in
that other world only or of their lives here as well? If in the other
world, how came they to this? If in this world, why are they not
already raised from it?
Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here? How else
can He know either that they are here, or that in their sojourn here
they have not forgotten Him and fallen away? And if He is aware of the
goodness of some, He must know of the wickedness of others, to
distinguish good from bad. That means that He is present to all, is, by
whatever mode, within this Universe. The Universe, therefore, must be
participant in Him.
If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and
you can have nothing to tell about Him or about the powers that come
after Him.
But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond --
making any concession to your liking -- it remains none the less
certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and
will not be: a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one
over fragments only; and similarly, Participation is more perfect in
the case of the All-Soul -- as is shown, further, by the very existence
of things and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that
advance these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the
Universe? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place; to make
it, except as a help towards truth, would be impiety.
The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but only
by one so blind, so utterly devoid of perception and thought, so far
from any vision of the Intellectual Universe as not even to see this
world of our own.
For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm
could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony
in sensible sounds? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to
take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of
order observed in visible things? Consider, even, the case of pictures:
those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting
do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred
by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of
what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth
-- the very experience out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of
Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that
other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world
of sense -- this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in
their remoteness display -- no one could be so dull-witted, so
immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and
gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung
from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither
fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other.
17. Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their
reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to Soul
and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior.
Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the
Universe and study all that still remains. They will think of the
Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the Ideal-Form
realized in the Kosmos.
They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce
incorporeal magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial
extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its
magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the principle
void of parts which is its model -- the greatness of power there being
translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the
Kosmic Sphere [the All-Soul] as already in movement under the guidance
of that power of God which holds it through and through, beginning and
middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising
as yet no outer governance: either approach will lead to a true
appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe.
Now let them set body within it -- not in the sense that Soul suffers
any change but that, since "In the Gods there can be no grudging," it
gives to its inferior all that any partial thing has strength to
receive and at once their conception of the Kosmos must be revised;
they cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has exercised such a
weight of power as to have brought the corporeal-principle, in itself
unlovely, to partake of good and beauty to the utmost of its
receptivity -- and to a pitch which stirs Souls, beings of the divine
order.
These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such
stirring, and that they see no difference between beautiful and ugly
forms of body; but, at that, they can make no distinction between the
ugly and the beautiful in conduct; sciences can have no beauty; there
can be none in thought; and none, therefore, in God. This world
descends from the Firsts: if this world has no beauty, neither has its
Source; springing thence, this world, too, must have its beautiful
things. And while they proclaim their contempt for earthly beauty, they
would do well to ignore that of youths and women so as not to be
overcome by incontinence.
In fine, we must consider that their self-satisfaction could not turn
upon a contempt for anything indisputably base; theirs is the perverse
pride of despising what was once admired.
We must always keep in mind that the beauty in a partial thing cannot
be identical with that in a whole; nor can any several objects be as
stately as the total.
And we must recognize, that, even in the world of sense and part, there
are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials --
forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and
convince us of their origin in the divine, forms which show how
ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme since they cannot hold us but we
must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further,
wherever there is interior beauty, we may be sure that inner and outer
correspond; where the interior is vile, all is brought low by that flaw
in the dominants.
Nothing base within can be beautiful without -- at least not with an
authentic beauty, for there are examples of a good exterior not sprung
from a beauty dominant within; people passing as handsome but
essentially base have that, a spurious and superficial beauty: if
anyone tells me he has seen people really fine-looking but interiorly
vile, I can only deny it; we have here simply a false notion of
personal beauty; unless, indeed, the inner vileness were an accident in
a nature essentially fine; in this Sphere there are many obstacles to
self-realization.
In any case the All is beautiful, and there can be no obstacle to its
inner goodness: where the nature of a thing does not comport perfection
from the beginning, there may be a failure in complete expression;
there may even be a fall to vileness, but the All never knew a
childlike immaturity; it never experienced a progress bringing novelty
into it; it never had bodily growth: there was nowhere from whence it
could take such increment; it was always the All-Container.
And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of process:
or, if this were conceded, certainly it could not be towards evil.
18. But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching
leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul
down in it.
In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them
declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less
maintains his residence in it; the other makes no complaint, asserts
the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day
when he may leave it, having no further need of a house: the malcontent
imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because
he has learned to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and
timber and that the place falls far short of a true home; he does not
see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with
necessity assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not cover a
secret admiration for the beauty of those same "stones." As long as we
have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good
sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation.
Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to
address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving
as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the
very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile;
it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no
longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a
mode very closely resembling the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the
universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding
staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing
no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock;
there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must
call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the
beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength.
Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within
ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies: when we
are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid
pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their
contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural
disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which
is theirs by the Principle of their Being.
This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to
themselves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the claim --
or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the
ordering of the Heavens, can never stand outside the material universe,
they themselves have their freedom in their death. This is a failure to
grasp the very notion of "standing outside," a failure to appreciate
the mode in which the All-Soul cares for the unensouled.
No: it is possible to go free of love for the body; to be clean-living,
to disregard death; to know the Highest and aim at that other world;
not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it
and faithful to it; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to
the stars because to our sense they stand still -- the error which in
another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature,
only because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation.
__________________________________________________________________
THE THIRD ENNEAD
__________________________________________________________________
FIRST TRACTATE.
FATE.
1. In the two orders of things -- those whose existence is that of
process and those in whom it is Authentic Being -- there is a variety
of possible relation to Cause.
Cause might conceivably underly all the entities in both orders or none
in either. It might underly some, only, in each order, the others being
causeless. It might, again, underly the Realm of Process universally
while in the Realm of Authentic Existence some things were caused,
others not, or all were causeless. Conceivably, on the other hand, the
Authentic Existents are all caused while in the Realm of Process some
things are caused and others not, or all are causeless.
Now, to begin with the Eternal Existents:
The Firsts among these, by the fact that they are Firsts, cannot be
referred to outside Causes; but all such as depend upon those Firsts
may be admitted to derive their Being from them.
And in all cases the Act may be referred to the Essence [as its cause],
for their Essence consists, precisely, in giving forth an appropriate
Act.
As for Things of Process -- or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not
eternally invariable -- we must hold that these are due to Cause;
Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for
unwarranted "slantings," for sudden movement of bodies apart from any
initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a soul with nothing to
drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind
the Soul under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself,
but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause. Something
willed -- within itself or without -- something desired, must lead it
to action; without motive it can have no motion.
On the assumption that all happens by Cause, it is easy to discover the
nearest determinants of any particular act or state and to trace it
plainly to them.
The cause of a visit to the centre of affairs will be that one thinks
it necessary to see some person or to receive a debt, or, in a word,
that one has some definite motive or impulse confirmed by a judgement
of expediency. Sometimes a condition may be referred to the arts, the
recovery of health for instance to medical science and the doctor.
Wealth has for its cause the discovery of a treasure or the receipt of
a gift, or the earning of money by manual or intellectual labour. The
child is traced to the father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of
favourable outside circumstances such as a particular diet or, more
immediately, a special organic aptitude or a wife apt to childbirth.
And the general cause of all is Nature.
2. But to halt at these nearest determinants, not to be willing to
penetrate deeper, indicates a sluggish mind, a dullness to all that
calls us towards the primal and transcendent causes.
How comes it that the same surface causes produce different results?
There is moonshine, and one man steals and the other does not: under
the influence of exactly similar surroundings one man falls sick and
the other keeps well; an identical set of operations makes one rich and
leaves another poor. The differences amongst us in manners, in
characters, in success, force us to go still further back.
Men therefore have never been able to rest at the surface causes.
One school postulates material principles, such as atoms; from the
movement, from the collisions and combinations of these, it derives the
existence and the mode of being of all particular phenomena, supposing
that all depends upon how these atoms are agglomerated, how they act,
how they are affected; our own impulses and states, even, are supposed
to be determined by these principles.
Such teaching, then, obtrudes this compulsion, an atomic Anagke, even
upon Real Being. Substitute, for the atoms, any other material entities
as principles and the cause of all things, and at once Real Being
becomes servile to the determination set up by them.
Others rise to the first-principle of all that exists and from it
derive all they tell of a cause penetrating all things, not merely
moving all but making each and everything; but they pose this as a fate
and a supremely dominating cause; not merely all else that comes into
being, but even our own thinking and thoughts would spring from its
movement, just as the several members of an animal move not at their
own choice but at the dictation of the leading principle which animal
life presupposes.
Yet another school fastens on the universal Circuit as embracing all
things and producing all by its motion and by the positions and mutual
aspect of the planets and fixed stars in whose power of foretelling
they find warrant for the belief that this Circuit is the universal
determinant.
Finally, there are those that dwell on the interconnection of the
causative forces and on their linked descent -- every later phenomenon
following upon an earlier, one always leading back to others by which
it arose and without which it could not be, and the latest always
subservient to what went before them -- but this is obviously to bring
in fate by another path. This school may be fairly distinguished into
two branches; a section which makes all depend upon some one principle
and a section which ignores such a unity.
Of this last opinion we will have something to say, but for the moment
we will deal with the former, taking the others in their turn.
3. "Atoms" or "elements" -- it is in either case an absurdity, an
impossibility, to hand over the universe and its contents to material
entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call
order, reasoning, and the governing soul into being; but the atomic
origin is, if we may use the phrase, the most impossible.
A good deal of truth has resulted from the discussion of this subject;
but, even to admit such principles does not compel us to admit
universal compulsion or any kind of "fate."
Suppose the atoms to exist:
These atoms are to move, one downwards -- admitting a down and an up --
another slant-wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing
here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the outcome,
this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus
prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws
of the science -- what science can operate where there is no order? --
or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the
future be something regulated.
Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under
compulsion to yield to whatsoever the atoms may bring: but would anyone
pretend that the acts and states of a soul or mind could be explained
by any atomic movements? How can we imagine that the onslaught of an
atom, striking downwards or dashing in from any direction, could force
the soul to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any
reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? And
what of the soul's resistance to bodily states? What movement of atoms
could compel one man to be a geometrician, set another studying
arithmetic or astronomy, lead a third to the philosophic life? In a
word, if we must go, like soulless bodies, wherever bodies push and
drive us, there is an end to our personal act and to our very existence
as living beings.
The School that erects other material forces into universal causes is
met by the same reasoning: we say that while these can warm us and
chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of
nothing that is done in the sphere of mind or soul: all this must be
traceable to quite another kind of Principle.
4. Another theory:
The Universe is permeated by one Soul, Cause of all things and events;
every separate phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in its place
with the general movement; all the various causes spring into action
from one source: therefore, it is argued, the entire descending claim
of causes and all their interaction must follow inevitably and so
constitute a universal determination. A plant rises from a root, and we
are asked on that account to reason that not only the interconnection
linking the root to all the members and every member to every other but
the entire activity and experience of the plant, as well, must be one
organized overruling, a "destiny" of the plant.
But such an extremity of determination, a destiny so all-pervasive,
does away with the very destiny that is affirmed: it shatters the
sequence and co-operation of causes.
It would be unreasonable to attribute to destiny the movement of our
limbs dictated by the mind and will: this is no case of something
outside bestowing motion while another thing accepts it and is thus set
into action; the mind itself is the prime mover.
Similarly in the case of the universal system; if all that performs act
and is subject to experience constitutes one substance, if one thing
does not really produce another thing under causes leading back
continuously one to another, then it is not a truth that all happens by
causes, there is nothing but a rigid unity. We are no "We": nothing is
our act; our thought is not ours; our decisions are the reasoning of
something outside ourselves; we are no more agents than our feet are
kickers when we use them to kick with.
No; each several thing must be a separate thing; there must be acts and
thoughts that are our own; the good and evil done by each human being
must be his own; and it is quite certain that we must not lay any
vileness to the charge of the All.
5. But perhaps the explanation of every particular act or event is
rather that they are determined by the spheric movement -- the Phora --
and by the changing position of the heavenly bodies as these stand at
setting or rising or in mid-course and in various aspects with each
other.
Augury, it is urged, is able from these indications to foretell what is
to happen not merely to the universe as a whole, but even to
individuals, and this not merely as regards external conditions of
fortune but even as to the events of the mind. We observe, too, how
growth or check in other orders of beings -- animals and Plants -- is
determined by their sympathetic relations with the heavenly bodies and
how widely they are influenced by them, how, for example, the various
countries show a different produce according to their situation on the
earth and especially their lie towards the sun. And the effect of place
is not limited to plants and animals; it rules human beings too,
determining their appearance, their height and colour, their mentality
and their desires, their pursuits and their moral habit. Thus the
universal circuit would seem to be the monarch of the All.
Now a first answer to this theory is that its advocates have merely
devised another shift to immolate to the heavenly bodies all that is
ours, our acts of will and our states, all the evil in us, our entire
personality; nothing is allowed to us; we are left to be stones set
rolling, not men, not beings whose nature implies a task.
But we must be allowed our own -- with the understanding that to what
is primarily ours, our personal holding, there is added some influx
from the All -- the distinction must be made between our individual act
and what is thrust upon us: we are not to be immolated to the stars.
Place and climate, no doubt, produce constitutions warmer or colder;
and the parents tell on the offspring, as is seen in the resemblance
between them, very general in personal appearance and noted also in
some of the unreflecting states of the mind.
None the less, in spite of physical resemblance and similar
environment, we observe the greatest difference in temperament and in
ideas: this side of the human being, then, derives from some quite
other Principle [than any external causation or destiny]. A further
confirmation is found in the efforts we make to correct both bodily
constitution and mental aspirations.
If the stars are held to be causing principles on the ground of the
possibility of foretelling individual fate or fortune from observation
of their positions, then the birds and all the other things which the
soothsayer observes for divination must equally be taken as causing
what they indicate.
Some further considerations will help to clarify this matter:
The heavens are observed at the moment of a birth and the individual
fate is thence predicted in the idea that the stars are no mere
indications, but active causes, of the future events. Sometimes the
Astrologers tell of noble birth; "the child is born of highly placed
parents"; yet how is it possible to make out the stars to be causes of
a condition which existed in the father and mother previously to that
star pattern on which the prediction is based?
And consider still further:
They are really announcing the fortunes of parents from the birth of
children; the character and career of children are included in the
predictions as to the parents -- they predict for the yet unborn! -- in
the lot of one brother they are foretelling the death of another; a
girl's fate includes that of a future husband, a boy's that of a wife.
Now, can we think that the star-grouping over any particular birth can
be the cause of what stands already announced in the facts about the
parents? Either the previous star-groupings were the determinants of
the child's future career or, if they were not, then neither is the
immediate grouping. And notice further that physical likeness to the
parents -- the Astrologers hold -- is of purely domestic origin: this
implies that ugliness and beauty are so caused and not by astral
movements.
Again, there must at one and the same time be a widespread coming to
birth -- men, and the most varied forms of animal life at the same
moment -- and these should all be under the one destiny since the one
pattern rules at the moment; how explain that identical star-groupings
give here the human form, there the animal?
6. But in fact everything follows its own Kind; the birth is a horse
because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from the Human
Kind; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part,
a very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being: allow the
stars a wide material action upon the bodily part of the man, producing
heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical
constitution; still does such action explain character, vocation and
especially all that seems quite independent of material elements, a man
taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator
in any of these pursuits? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings,
bestowing wickedness? And what of a doctrine that makes them wreak
vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are
being carried to a position beneath the earth -- as if a decline from
our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if they ever
ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure
around the earth.
Nor may we think that these divine beings lose or gain in goodness as
they see this one or another of the company in various aspects, and
that in their happier position they are benignant to us and, less
pleasantly situated, turn maleficent. We can but believe that their
circuit is for the protection of the entirety of things while they
furnish the incidental service of being letters on which the augur,
acquainted with that alphabet, may look and read the future from their
pattern -- arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a
soaring bird tells of some lofty event.
7. It remains to notice the theory of the one Causing-Principle alleged
to interweave everything with everything else, to make things into a
chain, to determine the nature and condition of each phenomenon -- a
Principle which, acting through seminal Reason-Forms -- Logoi
Spermatikoi -- elaborates all that exists and happens.
The doctrine is close to that which makes the Soul of the Universe the
source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without
or -- supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power
towards personal act -- within ourselves.
But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity: all the
causative forces enter into the system, and so every several phenomenon
rises necessarily; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power to
check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one
general cause leave us no resource but to go where they drive. All our
ideas will be determined by a chain of previous causes; our doings will
be determined by those ideas; personal action becomes a mere word. That
we are the agents does not save our freedom when our action is
prescribed by those causes; we have precisely what belongs to
everything that lives, to infants guided by blind impulses, to
lunatics; all these act; why, even fire acts; there is act in
everything that follows the plan of its being, servilely.
No one that sees the implications of this theory can hesitate: unable
to halt at such a determinant principle, we seek for other explanations
of our action.
8. What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of;
one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in
the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for
prediction and augury?
Soul: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other
Principle, not merely the Soul of the Universe but, included in it, the
Soul of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the
bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like
things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore
supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for,
brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would
hold rank in a series.
Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when
it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes [or,
by chance-causes]: there will therefore be a compromise; the action of
the Soul will be in part guided by this environment while in other
matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler
Soul will have the greater power; the poorer Soul, the lesser. A soul
which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage
and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power.
The soul of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is
more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves
the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its
innocence.
9. We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is brought about by this
compromise between evil and accidental circumstance: what room was
there for anything else than the thing that is? Given all the causes,
all must happen beyond aye or nay -- that is, all the external and
whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit -- therefore when the Soul
has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that
what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus,
neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary: so, too,
when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and
ignores the true, the highest, laws of action.
But when our Soul holds to its Reason-Principle, to the guide, pure and
detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal
operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as
our doing, for they have no other source; they are the issue of the
unmingled Soul, a Principle that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not
subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny
of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to
allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus.
10. To sum the results of our argument: All things and events are
foreshown and brought into being by causes; but the causation is of two
Kinds; there are results originating from the Soul and results due to
other causes, those of the environment.
In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the
light of sound reason is the Soul's work, while what is done where they
are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered.
Unwisdom, then, is not due to the Soul, and, in general -- if we mean
by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves -- an act is fated when it is
contrary to wisdom.
But all our best is of our own doing: such is our nature as long as we
remain detached. The wise and good do perform acts; their right action
is the expression of their own power: in the others it comes in the
breathing spaces when the passions are in abeyance; but it is not that
they draw this occasional wisdom from outside themselves; simply, they
are for the time being unhindered.
__________________________________________________________________
SECOND TRACTATE.
ON PROVIDENCE (1).
1. To make the existence and coherent structure of this Universe depend
upon automatic activity and upon chance is against all good sense.
Such a notion could be entertained only where there is neither
intelligence nor even ordinary perception; and reason enough has been
urged against it, though none is really necessary.
But there is still the question as to the process by which the
individual things of this sphere have come into being, how they were
made.
Some of them seem so undesirable as to cast doubts upon a Universal
Providence; and we find, on the one hand, the denial of any controlling
power, on the other the belief that the Kosmos is the work of an evil
creator.
This matter must be examined through and through from the very first
principles. We may, however, omit for the present any consideration of
the particular providence, that beforehand decision which accomplishes
or holds things in abeyance to some good purpose and gives or withholds
in our own regard: when we have established the Universal Providence
which we affirm, we can link the secondary with it.
Of course the belief that after a certain lapse of time a Kosmos
previously non-existent came into being would imply a foreseeing and a
reasoned plan on the part of God providing for the production of the
Universe and securing all possible perfection in it -- a guidance and
partial providence, therefore, such as is indicated. But since we hold
the eternal existence of the Universe, the utter absence of a beginning
to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the
providence ruling in the Universe as a universal consonance with the
divine Intelligence to which the Kosmos is subsequent not in time but
in the fact of derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelligence,
preceding it in Kind, is its cause as being the Archetype and Model
which it merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, it has
its existence and subsistence.
The relationship may be presented thus:
The authentic and primal Kosmos is the Being of the Intellectual
Principle and of the Veritable Existent. This contains within itself no
spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and
even its parts bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual
is not severed from the entire. In this Nature inheres all life and all
intellect, a life living and having intellection as one act within a
unity: every part that it gives forth is a whole; all its content is
its very own, for there is here no separation of thing from thing, no
part standing in isolated existence estranged from the rest, and
therefore nowhere is there any wronging of any other, any opposition.
Everywhere one and complete, it is at rest throughout and shows
difference at no point; it does not make over any of its content into
any new form; there can be no reason for changing what is everywhere
perfect.
Why should Reason elaborate yet another Reason, or Intelligence another
Intelligence? An indwelling power of making things is in the character
of a being not at all points as it should be but making, moving, by
reason of some failure in quality. Those whose nature is all
blessedness have no more to do than to repose in themselves and be
their being.
A widespread activity is dangerous to those who must go out from
themselves to act. But such is the blessedness of this Being that in
its very non-action it magnificently operates and in its self-dwelling
it produces mightily.
2. By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, one within itself, there
subsists this lower kosmos, no longer a true unity.
It is multiple, divided into various elements, thing standing apart
from thing in a new estrangement. No longer is there concord unbroken;
hostility, too, has entered as the result of difference and distance;
imperfection has inevitably introduced discord; for a part is not
self-sufficient, it must pursue something outside itself for its
fulfillment, and so it becomes the enemy to what it needs.
This Kosmos of parts has come into being not as the result of a
judgement establishing its desirability, but by the sheer necessity of
a secondary Kind.
The Intellectual Realm was not of a nature to be the ultimate of
existents. It was the First and it held great power, all there is of
power; this means that it is productive without seeking to produce; for
if effort and search were incumbent upon it, the Act would not be its
own, would not spring from its essential nature; it would be, like a
craftsman, producing by a power not inherent but acquired, mastered by
dint of study.
The Intellectual Principle, then, in its unperturbed serenity has
brought the universe into being, by communicating from its own store to
Matter: and this gift is the Reason-Form flowing from it. For the
Emanation of the Intellectual Principle is Reason, an emanation
unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle continues to have place
among beings.
The Reason-Principle within a seed contains all the parts and qualities
concentrated in identity; there is no distinction, no jarring, no
internal hindering; then there comes a pushing out into bulk, part
rises in distinction with part, and at once the members of the organism
stand in each other's way and begin to wear each other down.
So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the Reason-Form
emanating from it, our Universe rises and develops part, and inevitably
are formed groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups
discordant and combative; sometimes of choice and sometimes
incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering proceeds by
destruction.
Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the
one harmonious act; each utters its own voice, but all is brought into
accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the
ruling Reason-Principle. This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason,
like the Supernal, but participant in Intelligence and Reason: it
stands in need of the harmonizing because it is the meeting ground of
Necessity and divine Reason-Necessity pulling towards the lower,
towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the
Intellectual Principle remains sovereign over it.
The Intellectual Sphere [the Divine] alone is Reason, and there can
never be another Sphere that is Reason and nothing else; so that, given
some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be
Reason: yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the
utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are
Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is Soul,
presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as
labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than
an act of presence.
3. Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than beautiful,
as less than the noblest possible in the corporeal; and neither can any
charge be laid against its source.
The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of
deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own
likeness by a natural process. And none the less, a second
consideration, if a considered plan brought it into being it would
still be no disgrace to its maker -- for it stands a stately whole,
complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose and that of all
its parts which, leading and lesser alike, are of such a nature as to
further the interests of the total. It is, therefore, impossible to
condemn the whole on the merits of the parts which, besides, must be
judged only as they enter harmoniously or not into the whole, the main
consideration, quite overpassing the members which thus cease to have
importance. To linger about the parts is to condemn not the Kosmos but
some isolated appendage of it; in the entire living Being we fasten our
eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvellous spectacle of the
complete Man; we ignore all the tribes and kinds of animals except for
the meanest; we pass over an entire race, humanity, and bring forward
-- Thersites.
No: this thing that has come into Being is the Kosmos complete: do but
survey it, and surely this is the pleading you will hear:
I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of
life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing: for I
am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of
all the Kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of
Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness.
And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and
with living things of every race, and while the very sea has answered
to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air and the ether and
the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good
Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into that orderly eternal
circuit of the heavens which in its conscious movement ever about the
one Centre, seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine
Mind. And all that is within me strives towards the Good; and each, to
the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens
depend, with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part,
and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge
inanimate.
But there are degrees of participation: here no more than Existence,
elsewhere Life; and, in Life, sometimes mainly that of Sensation,
higher again that of Reason, finally Life in all its fullness. We have
no right to demand equal powers in the unequal: the finger is not to be
asked to see; there is the eye for that; a finger has its own business
-- to be finger and have finger power.
4. That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things should
not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being from outside
itself: this is no case of a self-originating substance being
annihilated by an external; it rose on the ruin of something else, and
thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing strange; and for every fire
quenched, another is kindled.
In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever;
in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and
so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body
to body entering into varied forms -- and, when it may, a Soul will
rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one Soul of all.
For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or
partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they
derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change;
only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness,
change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its
derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still
life of the divine.
The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are
inevitable, since things here are derived, brought into existence
because the Divine Reason which contains all of them in the upper
Heavens -- how could they come here unless they were There? -- must
outflow over the whole extent of Matter.
Similarly, the very wronging of man by man may be derived from an
effort towards the Good; foiled, in their weakness, of their true
desire, they turn against each other: still, when they do wrong, they
pay the penalty -- that of having hurt their Souls by their evil
conduct and of degradation to a lower place -- for nothing can ever
escape what stands decreed in the law of the Universe.
This is not to accept the idea, sometimes urged, that order is an
outcome of disorder and law of lawlessness, as if evil were a necessary
preliminary to their existence or their manifestation: on the contrary
order is the original and enters this sphere as imposed from without:
it is because order, law and reason exist that there can be disorder;
breach of law and unreason exist because Reason exists -- not that
these better things are directly the causes of the bad but simply that
what ought to absorb the Best is prevented by its own nature, or by
some accident, or by foreign interference. An entity which must look
outside itself for a law, may be foiled of its purpose by either an
internal or an external cause; there will be some flaw in its own
nature, or it will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm
follows, unintended, upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite
unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have freedom
of motion under their own will sometimes take the right turn, sometimes
the wrong.
Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring: a slight
deviation at the beginning develops with every advance into a
continuously wider and graver error -- especially since there is the
attached body with its inevitable concomitant of desire -- and the
first step, the hasty movement not previously considered and not
immediately corrected, ends by establishing a set habit where there was
at first only a fall.
Punishment naturally follows: there is no injustice in a man suffering
what belongs to the condition in which he is; nor can we ask to be
happy when our actions have not earned us happiness; the good, only,
are happy; divine beings are happy only because they are good.
5. Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this Universe, if
some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place but upon the
feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the one arena where
the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not born divine; what
wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And poverty and sickness
mean nothing to the good -- only to the evil are they disastrous -- and
where there is body there must be ill health.
Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the
co-ordination and completion of the Universal system.
One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason -- whose control nothing
anywhere eludes -- employs that ending to the beginning of something
new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the affliction,
loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought
into a new set of relations, into another class or order. Some of these
troubles are helpful to the very sufferers -- poverty and sickness, for
example -- and as for vice, even this brings something to the general
service: it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even,
produces good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and
consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper
mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast of the evil
under which wrong-doers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not
that evil exists for this purpose; but, as we have indicated, once the
wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends;
and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use
the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of
unknown forms.
The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in good,
and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it is lodged
in the alien: the good here is in something else, in something distinct
from the Good, and this something else constitutes the falling short
for it is not good. And this is why evil is ineradicable: there is,
first, the fact that in relation to this principle of Good, thing will
always stand less than thing, and, besides, all things come into being
through it and are what they are by standing away from it.
6. As for the disregard of desert -- the good afflicted, the unworthy
thriving -- it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the good nothing
is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still the question remains
why should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while
the wicked enjoy all it demands? How can such an allotment be approved?
No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness and
the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions
matter little: as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and
a bad man handsome.
Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a propriety, a
reasonableness, a regard to merit which, as things are, do not appear,
though this would certainly be in keeping with the noblest Providence:
even though external conditions do not affect a man's hold upon good or
evil, none the less it would seem utterly unfitting that the bad should
be the masters, be sovereign in the state, while honourable men are
slaves: a wicked ruler may commit the most lawless acts; and in war the
worst men have a free hand and perpetrate every kind of crime against
their prisoners.
We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence.
Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less
he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when
these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings: the
Providence must reach to all the details; its functioning must consist
in neglecting no point.
Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies under
an Intellectual Principle whose power has touched every existent, we
cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what way the detail of
this sphere is just.
7. A preliminary observation: in looking for excellence in this thing
of mixture, the Kosmos, we cannot require all that is implied in the
excellence of the unmingled; it is folly to ask for Firsts in the
Secondary, and since this Universe contains body, we must allow for
some bodily influence upon the total and be thankful if the mingled
existent lack nothing of what its nature allowed it to receive from the
Divine Reason.
Thus, supposing we were enquiring for the finest type of the human
being as known here, we would certainly not demand that he prove
identical with Man as in the Divine Intellect; we would think it enough
in the Creator to have so brought this thing of flesh and nerve and
bone under Reason as to give grace to these corporeal elements and to
have made it possible for Reason to have contact with Matter.
Our progress towards the object of our investigation must begin from
this principle of gradation which will open to us the wonder of the
Providence and of the power by which our universe holds its being.
We begin with evil acts entirely dependent upon the Souls which
perpetrate them -- the harm, for example, which perverted Souls do to
the good and to each other. Unless the foreplanning power alone is to
be charged with the vice in such Souls, we have no ground of
accusation, no claim to redress: the blame lies on the Soul exercising
its choice. Even a Soul, we have seen, must have its individual
movement; it is not abstract Spirit; the first step towards animal life
has been taken and the conduct will naturally be in keeping with that
character.
It is not because the world existed that Souls are here: before the
world was, they had it in them to be of the world, to concern
themselves with it, to presuppose it, to administer it: it was in their
nature to produce it -- by whatever method, whether by giving forth
some emanation while they themselves remained above, or by an actual
descent, or in both ways together, some presiding from above, others
descending; some for we are not at the moment concerned about the mode
of creation but are simply urging that, however the world was produced,
no blame falls on Providence for what exists within it.
There remains the other phase of the question -- the distribution of
evil to the opposite classes of men: the good go bare while the wicked
are rich: all that human need demands, the least deserving have in
abundance; it is they that rule; peoples and states are at their
disposal. Would not all this imply that the divine power does not reach
to earth?
That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules
in the lower things: animals and plants have their share in Reason,
Soul and Life.
Perhaps, then, it reaches to earth but is not master over all?
We answer that the universe is one living organism: as well maintain
that while human head and face are the work of nature and of the ruling
reason-principle, the rest of the frame is due to other agencies --
accident or sheer necessity -- and owes its inferiority to this origin,
or to the incompetence of unaided Nature. And even granting that those
less noble members are not in themselves admirable it would still be
neither pious nor even reverent to censure the entire structure.
8. Thus we come to our enquiry as to the degree of excellence found in
things of this Sphere, and how far they belong to an ordered system or
in what degree they are, at least, not evil.
Now in every living being the upper parts -- head, face -- are the most
beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior. In the Universe the
middle and lower members are human beings; above them, the Heavens and
the Gods that dwell there; these Gods with the entire circling expanse
of the heavens constitute the greater part of the Kosmos: the earth is
but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the
stars. Yet human wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder; we are
evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the Universe,
nothing wiser existent!
But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and
inclines now to the one order, now to the other; some men grow like to
the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral. But
those that are corrupted to the point of approximating to irrational
animals and wild beasts pull the mid-folk about and inflict wrong upon
them; the victims are no doubt better than the wrongdoers, but are at
the mercy of their inferiors in the field in which they themselves are
inferior, where, that is, they cannot be classed among the good since
they have not trained themselves in self-defence.
A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the
intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and throw
another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with
their food and their dainty clothes. What more is called for than a
laugh?
And surely even the lawgiver would be right in allowing the second
group to suffer this treatment, the penalty of their sloth and
self-indulgence: the gymnasium lies there before them, and they, in
laziness and luxury and listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall
like fat-loaded sheep, a prey to the wolves. But the evil-doers also
have their punishment: first they pay in that very wolfishness, in the
disaster to their human quality: and next there is laid up for them the
due of their Kind: living ill here, they will not get off by death; on
every precedent through all the line there waits its sequent,
reasonable and natural -- worse to the bad, better to the good.
This at once brings us outside the gymnasium with its fun for boys;
they must grow up, both kinds, amid their childishness and both one day
stand girt and armed. Then there is a finer spectacle than is ever seen
by those that train in the ring. But at this stage some have not armed
themselves -- and the duly armed win the day.
Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike:
the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men,
not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for
tilling; healthy days are not for those that neglect their health: we
have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if
they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.
Again: it is childish, while we carry on all the affairs of our life to
our own taste and not as the Gods would have us, to expect them to keep
all well for us in spite of a life that is lived without regard to the
conditions which the Gods have prescribed for our well-being. Yet death
would be better for us than to go on living lives condemned by the laws
of the Universe. If things took the contrary course, if all the modes
of folly and wickedness brought no trouble in life -- then indeed we
might complain of the indifference of a Providence leaving the victory
to evil.
Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled: and this is just; the
triumph of weaklings would not be just.
9. It would not be just, because Providence cannot be a something
reducing us to nothingness: to think of Providence as everything, with
no other thing in existence, is to annihilate the Universe; such a
providence could have no field of action; nothing would exist except
the Divine. As things are, the Divine, of course, exists, but has
reached forth to something other -- not to reduce that to nothingness
but to preside over it; thus in the case of Man, for instance, the
Divine presides as the Providence, preserving the character of human
nature, that is the character of a being under the providential law,
which, again, implies subjection to what that law may enjoin.
And that law enjoins that those who have made themselves good shall
know the best of life, here and later, the bad the reverse. But the law
does not warrant the wicked in expecting that their prayers should
bring others to sacrifice themselves for their sakes; or that the gods
should lay aside the divine life in order to direct their daily
concerns; or that good men, who have chosen a path nobler than all
earthly rule, should become their rulers. The perverse have never made
a single effort to bring the good into authority, nor do they take any
steps to improve themselves; they are all spite against anyone that
becomes good of his own motion, though if good men were placed in
authority the total of goodness would be increased.
In sum: Man has come into existence, a living being but not a member of
the noblest order; he occupies by choice an intermediate rank; still,
in that place in which he exists, Providence does not allow him to be
reduced to nothing; on the contrary he is ever being led upwards by all
those varied devices which the Divine employs in its labour to increase
the dominance of moral value. The human race, therefore, is not
deprived by Providence of its rational being; it retains its share,
though necessarily limited, in wisdom, intelligence, executive power
and right doing, the right doing, at least, of individuals to each
other -- and even in wronging others people think they are doing right
and only paying what is due.
Man is, therefore, a noble creation, as perfect as the scheme allows; a
part, no doubt, in the fabric of the All, he yet holds a lot higher
than that of all the other living things of earth.
Now, no one of any intelligence complains of these others, man's
inferiors, which serve to the adornment of the world; it would be
feeble indeed to complain of animals biting man, as if we were to pass
our days asleep. No: the animal, too, exists of necessity, and is
serviceable in many ways, some obvious and many progressively
discovered -- so that not one lives without profit to itself and even
to humanity. It is ridiculous, also, to complain that many of them are
dangerous -- there are dangerous men abroad as well -- and if they
distrust us, and in their distrust attack, is that anything to wonder
at?
10. But: if the evil in men is involuntary, if their own will has not
made them what they are, how can we either blame wrong-doers or even
reproach their victims with suffering through their own fault?
If there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by
force of the celestial movement or by a rigorous sequence set up by the
First Cause, is not the evil a thin rooted in Nature? And if thus the
Reason-Principle of the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is
injustice?
No: Men are no doubt involuntary sinners in the sense that they do not
actually desire to sin; but this does not alter the fact that
wrongdoers, of their own choice, are, themselves, the agents; it is
because they themselves act that the sin is in their own; if they were
not agents they could not sin.
The Necessity [held to underlie human wickedness] is not an outer force
[actually compelling the individual], but exists only in the sense of a
universal relationship.
Nor is the force of the celestial Movement such as to leave us
powerless: if the universe were something outside and apart from us it
would stand as its makers willed so that, once the gods had done their
part, no man, however impious, could introduce anything contrary to
their intention. But, as things are, efficient act does come from men:
given the starting Principle, the secondary line, no doubt, is
inevitably completed; but each and every principle contributes towards
the sequence. Now Men are Principles, or, at least, they are moved by
their characteristic nature towards all that is good, and that nature
is a Principle, a freely acting cause.
11. Are we, then, to conclude that particular things are determined by
Necessities rooted in Nature and by the sequence of causes, and that
everything is as good as anything can be?
No: the Reason-Principle is the sovereign, making all: it wills things
as they are and, in its reasonable act, it produces even what we know
as evil: it cannot desire all to be good: an artist would not make an
animal all eyes; and in the same way, the Reason-Principle would not
make all divine; it makes Gods but also celestial spirits, the
intermediate order, then men, then the animals; all is graded
succession, and this in no spirit of grudging but in the expression of
a Reason teeming with intellectual variety.
We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours
are not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on
the appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because
the persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and
some scurrilous clown; yet take away the low characters and the power
of the drama is gone; these are part and parcel of it.
12. Suppose this Universe were the direct creation of the
Reason-Principle applying itself, quite unchanged, to Matter,
retaining, that is, the hostility to partition which it derives from
its Prior, the Intellectual Principle -- then, this its product, so
produced, would be of supreme and unparalleled excellence. But the
Reason-Principle could not be a thing of entire identity or even of
closely compact diversity; and the mode in which it is here manifested
is no matter of censure since its function is to be all things, each
single thing in some distinctive way.
But has it not, besides itself entering Matter, brought other beings
down? Has it not for example brought Souls into Matter and, in adapting
them to its creation, twisted them against their own nature and been
the ruin of many of them? And can this be right?
The answer is that the Souls are, in a fair sense, members of this
Reason-Principle and that it has not adapted them to the creation by
perverting them, but has set them in the place here to which their
quality entitles them.
13. And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is
something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods
of the past and, again, those in the future; and these have everything
to do with fixing worth of place.
Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his
power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money
will be made poor -- and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those
that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the
murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer
are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited
treatment.
It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by
chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what
he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and
be murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to
be wronged.
Hence arises that awesome word "Adrasteia" [the Inevadable
Retribution]; for in very truth this ordinance is an Adrasteia, justice
itself and a wonderful wisdom.
We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some
such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence --
the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total; the marvellous
art shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of
the All, but even amid such littleness as one would think Providence
must disdain: the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal
form; the world of vegetation, too; the grace of fruits and even of
leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom;
and all this not issuing once, and then to die out, but made ever and
ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth.
In all the changing, there is no change by chance: there is no taking
of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine Powers.
All that is Divine executes the Act of its quality; its quality is the
expression of its essential Being: and this essential Being in the
Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one thing the desirable
and the just -- for if the good and the just are not produced there,
where, then, have they their being?
14. The ordinance of the Kosmos, then, is in keeping with the
Intellectual Principle. True, no reasoning went to its creation, but it
so stands that the keenest reasoning must wonder -- since no reasoning
could be able to make it otherwise -- at the spectacle before it, a
product which, even in the Kinds of the partial and particular Sphere,
displays the Divine Intelligence to a degree in which no arranging by
reason could express it. Every one of the ceaselessly recurrent types
of being manifests a creating Reason-Principle above all censure. No
fault is to be found unless on the assumption that everything ought to
come into being with all the perfection of those that have never known
such a coming, the Eternals. In that case, things of the Intellectual
realm and things of the realm of sense must remain one unbroken
identity for ever.
In this demand for more good than exists, there is implied a failure to
recognize that the form allotted to each entity is sufficient in
itself; it is like complaining because one kind of animal lacks horns.
We ought to understand both that the Reason-Principle must extend to
every possible existent and, at the same time, that every greater must
include lesser things, that to every whole belong its parts, and that
all cannot be equality unless all part is to be absent.
This is why in the Over-World each entity is all, while here, below,
the single thing is not all [is not the Universe but a "Self"] . Thus
too, a man, an individual, in so far as he is a part, is not Humanity
complete: but wheresoever there is associated with the parts something
that is no part [but a Divine, an Intellectual Being], this makes a
whole of that in which it dwells. Man, man as partial thing, cannot be
required to have attained to the very summit of goodness: if he had, he
would have ceased to be of the partial order. Not that there is any
grudging in the whole towards the part that grows in goodness and
dignity; such an increase in value is a gain to the beauty of the
whole; the lesser grows by being made over in the likeness of the
greater, by being admitted, as it were, to something of that greatness,
by sharing in that rank, and thus even from this place of man, from
man's own self, something gleams forth, as the stars shine in the
divine firmament, so that all appears one great and lovely figure --
living or wrought in the furnaces of craftsmanship -- with stars
radiant not only in the ears and on the brow but on the breasts too,
and wherever else they may be displayed in beauty.
15. These considerations apply very well to things considered as
standing alone: but there is a stumbling-block, a new problem, when we
think of all these forms, permanent and ceaselessly produced, in mutual
relationship.
The animals devour each other: men attack each other: all is war
without rest, without truce: this gives new force to the question how
Reason can be author of the plan and how all can be declared well done.
This new difficulty is not met by the former answer; that all stands as
well as the nature of things allows; that the blame for their condition
falls on Matter dragging them down; that, given the plan as we know it,
evil cannot be eliminated and should not be; that the Matter making its
presence felt is still not supreme but remains an element taken in from
outside to contribute to a definite total, or rather to be itself
brought to order by Reason.
The Divine Reason is the beginning and the end; all that comes into
being must be rational and fall at its coming into an ordered scheme
reasonable at every point. Where, then, is the necessity of this bandit
war of man and beast?
This devouring of Kind by Kind is necessary as the means to the
transmutation of living things which could not keep form for ever even
though no other killed them: what grievance is it that when they must
go their despatch is so planned as to be serviceable to others?
Still more, what does it matter when they are devoured only to return
in some new form? It comes to no more than the murder of one of the
personages in a play; the actor alters his make-up and enters in a new
role. The actor, of course, was not really killed; but if dying is but
changing a body as the actor changes a costume, or even an exit from
the body like the exit of the actor from the boards when he has no more
to say or do, what is there so very dreadful in this transformation of
living beings one into another?
Surely it is much better so than if they had never existed: that way
would mean the bleak quenching of life, precluded from passing outside
itself; as the plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a
Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into
their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of
comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime.
Men directing their weapons against each other -- under doom of death
yet neatly lined up to fight as in the pyrrhic sword-dances of their
sport -- this is enough to tell us that all human intentions are but
play, that death is nothing terrible, that to die in a war or in a
fight is but to taste a little beforehand what old age has in store, to
go away earlier and come back the sooner. So for misfortunes that may
accompany life, the loss of property, for instance; the loser will see
that there was a time when it was not his, that its possession is but a
mock boon to the robbers, who will in their turn lose it to others, and
even that to retain property is a greater loss than to forfeit it.
Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities,
all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a
play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off,
acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it
is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man,
that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage
which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this
is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer
life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver
doings alike, he is but at play; to handle austere matters austerely is
reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a
futility. Those incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into
frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature. Anyone that
joins in their trifling and so comes to look on life with their eyes
must understand that by lending himself to such idleness he has laid
aside his own character. If Socrates himself takes part in the
trifling, he trifles in the outer Socrates.
We must remember, too, that we cannot take tears and laments as proof
that anything is wrong; children cry and whimper where there is nothing
amiss.
16. But if all this is true, what room is left for evil? Where are we
to place wrong-doing and sin?
How explain that in a world organized in good, the efficient agents
[human beings] behave unjustly, commit sin? And how comes misery if
neither sin nor injustice exists?
Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can
the distinction be maintained between behaviour in accordance with
nature and behaviour in conflict with it?
And what becomes of blasphemy against the divine? The blasphemer is
made what he is: a dramatist has written a part insulting and maligning
himself and given it to an actor to play.
These considerations oblige us to state the Logos [the Reason-Principle
of the Universe] once again, and more clearly, and to justify its
nature.
This Reason-Principle, then -- let us dare the definition in the hope
of conveying the truth -- this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle
unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from
the pure Soul alone; it is a dependent of that Soul while, in a sense,
it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the Intellectual
Principle and the Soul -- the Soul as conditioned by the Intellectual
Principle engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a
certain measure of Reason.
Now all life, even the least valuable, is an activity, and not a blind
activity like that of flame; even where there is not sensation the
activity of life is no mere haphazard play of Movement: any object in
which life is present, and object which participates in Life, is at
once enreasoned in the sense that the activity peculiar to life is
formative, shaping as it moves.
Life, then, aims at pattern as does the pantomimic dancer with his set
movements; the mime, in himself, represents life, and, besides, his
movements proceed in obedience to a pattern designed to symbolize life.
Thus far to give us some idea of the nature of Life in general.
But this Reason-Principle which emanates from the complete unity,
divine Mind, and the complete unity Life [= Soul] -- is neither a
uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete divine Mind, nor does it
give itself whole and all-including to its subject. [By an imperfect
communication] it sets up a conflict of part against part: it produces
imperfect things and so engenders and maintains war and attack, and
thus its unity can be that only of a sum-total not of a thing
undivided. At war with itself in the parts which it now exhibits, it
has the unity, or harmony, of a drama torn with struggle. The drama, of
course, brings the conflicting elements to one final harmony, weaving
the entire story of the clashing characters into one thing; while in
the Logos the conflict of the divergent elements rises within the one
element, the Reason-Principle: the comparison therefore is rather with
a harmony emerging directly from the conflicting elements themselves,
and the question becomes what introduces clashing elements among these
Reason-Principles.
Now in the case of music, tones high and low are the product of
Reason-Principles which, by the fact that they are Principles of
harmony, meet in the unit of Harmony, the absolute Harmony, a more
comprehensive Principle, greater than they and including them as its
parts. Similarly in the Universe at large we find contraries -- white
and black, hot and cold, winged and wingless, footed and footless,
reasoning and unreasoning -- but all these elements are members of one
living body, their sum-total; the Universe is a self-accordant entity,
its members everywhere clashing but the total being the manifestation
of a Reason-Principle. That one Reason-Principle, then, must be the
unification of conflicting Reason-Principles whose very opposition is
the support of its coherence and, almost, of its Being.
And indeed, if it were not multiple, it could not be a Universal
Principle, it could not even be at all a Reason-Principle; in the fact
of its being a Reason-Principle is contained the fact of interior
difference. Now the maximum of difference is contrariety; admitting
that this differentiation exists and creates, it will create difference
in the greatest and not in the least degree; in other words, the
Reason-Principle, bringing about differentiation to the uttermost
degree, will of necessity create contrarieties: it will be complete
only by producing itself not in merely diverse things but in contrary
things.
17. The nature of the Reason-Principle is adequately expressed in its
Act and, therefore, the wider its extension the nearer will its
productions approach to full contrariety: hence the world of sense is
less a unity than is its Reason-Principle; it contains a wider
multiplicity and contrariety: its partial members will, therefore, be
urged by a closer intention towards fullness of life, a warmer desire
for unification.
But desire often destroys the desired; it seeks its own good, and, if
the desired object is perishable, the ruin follows: and the partial
thing straining towards its completing principle draws towards itself
all it possibly can.
Thus, with the good we have the bad: we have the opposed movements of a
dancer guided by one artistic plan; we recognize in his steps the good
as against the bad, and see that in the opposition lies the merit of
the design.
But, thus, the wicked disappear?
No: their wickedness remains; simply, their role is not of their own
planning.
But, surely, this excuses them?
No; excuse lies with the Reason-Principle -- and the Reason-Principle
does not excuse them.
No doubt all are members of this Principle but one is a good man,
another is bad -- the larger class, this -- and it goes as in a play;
the poet while he gives each actor a part is also using them as they
are in their own persons: he does not himself rank the men as leading
actor, second, third; he simply gives suitable words to each, and by
that assignment fixes each man's standing.
Thus, every man has his place, a place that fits the good man, a place
that fits the bad: each within the two orders of them makes his way,
naturally, reasonably, to the place, good or bad, that suits him, and
takes the position he has made his own. There he talks and acts, in
blasphemy and crime or in all goodness: for the actors bring to this
play what they were before it was ever staged.
In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors
add their own quality, good or bad -- for they have more to do than
merely repeat the author's words -- in the truer drama which dramatic
genius imitates in its degree, the Soul displays itself in a part
assigned by the creator of the piece.
As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of
state or rags, so a Soul is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphazard
but always under a Reason: it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to
it, attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole
Principle of the piece: then it speaks out its business, exhibiting at
the same time all that a Soul can express of its own quality, as a
singer in a song. A voice, a bearing, naturally fine or vulgar, may
increase the charm of a piece; on the other hand, an actor with his
ugly voice may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the drama stands
as good a work as ever: the dramatist, taking the action which a sound
criticism suggests, disgraces one, taking his part from him, with
perfect justice: another man he promotes to more serious roles or to
any more important play he may have, while the first is cast for
whatever minor work there may be.
Just so the Soul, entering this drama of the Universe, making itself a
part of the Play, bringing to its acting its personal excellence or
defect, set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the
author its entire role -- superimposed upon its own character and
conduct -- just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward.
But these actors, Souls, hold a peculiar dignity: they act in a vaster
place than any stage: the Author has made them masters of all this
world; they have a wide choice of place; they themselves determine the
honour or discredit in which they are agents since their place and part
are in keeping with their quality: they therefore fit into the
Reason-Principle of the Universe, each adjusted, most legitimately, to
the appropriate environment, as every string of the lyre is set in the
precisely right position, determined by the Principle directing musical
utterance, for the due production of the tones within its capacity. All
is just and good in the Universe in which every actor is set in his own
quite appropriate place, though it be to utter in the Darkness and in
Tartarus the dreadful sounds whose utterance there is well.
This Universe is good not when the individual is a stone, but when
everyone throws in his own voice towards a total harmony, singing out a
life -- thin, harsh, imperfect, though it be. The Syrinx does not utter
merely one pure note; there is a thin obscure sound which blends in to
make the harmony of Syrinx music: the harmony is made up from tones of
various grades, all the tones differing, but the resultant of all
forming one sound.
Similarly the Reason-Principle entire is One, but it is broken into
unequal parts: hence the difference of place found in the Universe,
better spots and worse; and hence the inequality of Souls, finding
their appropriate surroundings amid this local inequality. The diverse
places of this sphere, the Souls of unequal grade and unlike conduct,
are wen exemplified by the distinction of parts in the Syrinx or any
other instrument: there is local difference, but from every position
every string gives forth its own tone, the sound appropriate, at once,
to its particular place and to the entire plan.
What is evil in the single Soul will stand a good thing in the
universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in
the total event -- and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is,
though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as,
in another order of image, the executioner's ugly office does not mar
the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the
corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things
are, all is well.
18. Souls vary in worth; and the difference is due, among other causes,
to an almost initial inequality; it is in reason that, standing to the
Reason-Principle, as parts, they should be unequal by the fact of
becoming separate.
We must also remember that every Soul has its second grade and its
third, and that, therefore, its expression may take any one of three
main forms. But this point must be dealt with here again: the matter
requires all possible elucidation.
We may perhaps think of actors having the right to add something to the
poet's words: the drama as it stands is not perfectly filled in, and
they are to supply where the Author has left blank spaces here and
there; the actors are to be something else as well; they become parts
of the poet, who on his side has a foreknowledge of the word they will
add, and so is able to bind into one story what the actors bring in and
what is to follow.
For, in the All, the sequences, including what follows upon wickedness,
become Reason-Principles, and therefore in right reason. Thus: from
adultery and the violation of prisoners the process of nature will
produce fine children, to grow, perhaps, into fine men; and where
wicked violence has destroyed cities, other and nobler cities may rise
in their place.
But does not this make it absurd to introduce Souls as responsible
causes, some acting for good and some for evil? If we thus exonerate
the Reason-Principle from any part in wickedness do we not also cancel
its credit for the good? Why not simply take the doings of these actors
for representative parts of the Reason-Principle as the doings of
stage-actors are representative parts of the stage-drama? Why not admit
that the Reason-Principle itself includes evil action as much as good
action, and inspires the precise conduct of all its representatives?
Would not this be all the more Plausible in that the universal drama is
the completer creation and that the Reason-Principle is the source of
all that exists?
But this raises the question: "What motive could lead the Logos to
produce evil?"
The explanation, also, would take away all power in the Universe from
Souls, even those nearest to the divine; they would all be mere parts
of a Reason-Principle.
And, further -- unless all Reason-Principles are Souls -- why should
some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is
itself a Soul?
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
ON PROVIDENCE (2).
1. What is our answer?
All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the
Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts -- strictly
"included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but
encompasses them.
The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its
parts [i.e., events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts.
This unity, Soul, has different parts; the Reason-Principles,
correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the
ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being.
The Souls are in harmony with each other and so, too, are their acts
and effects; but it is harmony in the sense of a resultant unity built
out of contraries. All things, as they rise from a unity, come back to
unity by a sheer need of nature; differences unfold themselves,
contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized system by
the unity at the source.
The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal
life: there is one genus, horse, though horses among themselves fight
and bite and show malice and angry envy: so all the others within the
unity of their Kind; and so humanity.
All these types, again, can be ranged under the one Kind, that of
living things; objects without life can be thought of under their
specific types and then be resumed under the one Kind of the
"non-living"; if we choose to go further yet, living and non-living may
be included under the one Kind, "Beings," and, further still, under the
Source of Being.
Having attached all to this source, we turn to move down again in
continuous division: we see the Unity fissuring, as it reaches out into
Universality, and yet embracing all in one system so that with all its
differentiation it is one multiple living thing -- an organism in which
each member executes the function of its own nature while it still has
its being in that One Whole; fire burns; horse does horse work; men
give, each the appropriate act of the peculiar personal quality -- and
upon the several particular Kinds to which each belongs follow the
acts, and the good or evil of the life.
2. Circumstances are not sovereign over the good of life, for they are
themselves moulded by their priors and come in as members of a
sequence. The Leading-Principle holds all the threads while the minor
agents, the individuals, serve according to their own capacities, as in
a war the generalissimo lays down the plan and his subordinates do
their best to its furtherance. The Universe has been ordered by a
Providence that may be compared to a general; he has considered
operations, conditions and such practical needs as food and drink, arms
and engines of war; all the problem of reconciling these complex
elements has been worked out beforehand so as to make it probable that
the final event may be success. The entire scheme emerges from the
general's mind with a certain plausible promise, though it cannot cover
the enemy's operations, and there is no power over the disposition of
the enemy's forces: but where the mighty general is in question whose
power extends over all that is, what can pass unordered, what can fail
to fit into the plan?
3. For, even though the I is sovereign in choosing, yet by the fact of
the choice the thing done takes its place in the ordered total. Your
personality does not come from outside into the universal scheme; you
are a part of it, you and your personal disposition.
But what is the cause of this initial personality?
This question resolves itself into two: are we to make the Creator, if
Creator there is, the cause of the moral quality of the individual or
does the responsibility lie with the creature?
Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility? After all, none is charged in
the case of plants brought into being without the perceptive faculties;
no one is blamed because animals are not all that men are -- which
would be like complaining that men are not all that gods are. Reason
acquits plant and animal and, their maker; how can it complain because
men do not stand above humanity?
If the reproach simply means that Man might improve by bringing from
his own stock something towards his betterment we must allow that the
man failing in this is answerable for his own inferiority: but if the
betterment must come not from within the man but from without, from his
Author, it is folly to ask more than has been given, as foolish in the
case of man as in plant and animal.
The question is not whether a thing is inferior to something else but
whether in its own Kind it suffices to its own part; universal equality
there cannot be.
Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose
of inequality?
Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things:
the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul;
the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this
Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but
is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where
there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries,
tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be
that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by
stage of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the
Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul [a
lesser phase], not that [the Supreme Soul] from which the
Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life
weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still
more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin
and yet, what a marvel!
In sum nothing can secure to a thing of process the quality of the
prior order, loftier than all that is product and amenable to no charge
in regard to it: the wonder is, only, that it reaches and gives to the
lower at all, and that the traces of its presence should be so noble.
And if its outgiving is greater than the lower can appropriate, the
debt is the heavier; all the blame must fall upon the unreceptive
creature, and Providence be the more exalted.
4. If man were all of one piece -- I mean, if he were nothing more than
a made thing, acting and acted upon according to a fixed nature -- he
could be no more subject to reproach and punishment than the mere
animals. But as the scheme holds, man is singled out for condemnation
when he does evil; and this with justice. For he is no mere thing made
to rigid plan; his nature contains a Principle apart and free.
This does not, however, stand outside of Providence or of the Reason of
the All; the Over-World cannot be dependent upon the World of Sense.
The higher shines down upon the lower, and this illumination is
Providence in its highest aspect: The Reason-Principle has two phases,
one which creates the things of process and another which links them
with the higher beings: these higher beings constitute the
over-providence on which depends that lower providence which is the
secondary Reason-Principle inseparably united with its primal: the two
-- the Major and Minor Providence -- acting together produce the
universal woof, the one all-comprehensive Providence.
Men possess, then, a distinctive Principle: but not all men turn to
account all that is in their Nature; there are men that live by one
Principle and men that live by another or, rather, by several others,
the least noble. For all these Principles are present even when not
acting upon the man -- though we cannot think of them as lying idle;
everything performs its function.
"But," it will be said, "what reason can there be for their not acting
upon the man once they are present; inaction must mean absence?"
We maintain their presence always, nothing void of them.
But surely not where they exercise no action? If they necessarily
reside in all men, surely they must be operative in all -- this
Principle of free action, especially.
First of all, this free Principle is not an absolute possession of the
animal Kinds and is not even an absolute possession to all men.
So this Principle is not the only effective force in all men?
There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it alone
acts, giving its character to the life while all else is but Necessity
[and therefore outside of blame].
For [in the case of an evil life] whether it is that the constitution
of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled paths or whether
[the fault is mental or spiritual in that] the desires have gained
control, we are compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum
[something inferior to the highest principle in Man]. We would be
naturally inclined to say that this substratum [the responsible source
of evil] must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the
Reason-Principle; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle but
Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter
as shaped in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free
Principle in man [which is a phase of the All Soul] the Substratum [the
direct inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter but] the Reason-Principle
itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that
neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is
sovereign within us.
The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a
former life; we may suppose that previous actions have made the
Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior in radiance to that
which ruled before; the Soul which later will shine out again is for
the present at a feebler power.
And any Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the
Reason-Principle of Matter which therefore it is able to elaborate to
its own purposes, either finding it consonant with itself or bestowing
upon it the quality which makes it so. The Reason-Principle of an ox
does not occur except in connection with the Matter appropriate to the
ox-Kind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which
we read takes place; the Soul must lose its nature, the
Reason-Principle be transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which
once was Man. The degradation, then, is just. Still, how did the
inferior Principle ever come into being, and how does the higher fall
to it? Once more -- not all things are Firsts; there are Secondaries
and Tertiaries, of a nature inferior to that of their Priors; and a
slight tilt is enough to determine the departure from the straight
course. Further, the linking of any one being with any other amounts to
a blending such as to produce a distinct entity, a compound of the two;
it is not that the greater and prior suffers any diminution of its own
nature; the lesser and secondary is such from its very beginning; it is
in its own nature the lesser thing it becomes, and if it suffers the
consequences, such suffering is merited: all our reasonings on these
questions must take account of previous living as the source from which
the present takes its rise.
5. There is, then a Providence, which permeates the Kosmos from first
to last, not everywhere equal, as in a numerical distribution, but
proportioned, differing, according to the grades of place -- just as in
some one animal, linked from first to last, each member has its own
function, the nobler organ the higher activity while others
successively concern the lower degrees of the life, each part acting of
itself, and experiencing what belongs to its own nature and what comes
from its relation with every other. Strike, and what is designed for
utterance gives forth the appropriate volume of sound while other parts
take the blow in silence but react in their own especial movement; the
total of all the utterance and action and receptivity constitutes what
we may call the personal voice, life and history of the living form.
The parts, distinct in Kind, have distinct functions: the feet have
their work and the eyes theirs; the understanding serves to one end,
the Intellectual Principle to another.
But all sums to a unity, a comprehensive Providence. From the inferior
grade downwards is Fate: the upper is Providence alone: for in the
Intellectual Kosmos all is Reason-Principle or its Priors-Divine Mind
and unmingled Soul-and immediately upon these follows Providence which
rises from Divine Mind, is the content of the Unmingled Soul, and,
through this Soul, is communicated to the Sphere of living things.
This Reason-Principle comes as a thing of unequal parts, and therefore
its creations are unequal, as, for example, the several members of one
Living Being. But after this allotment of rank and function, all act
consonant with the will of the gods keeps the sequence and is included
under the providential government, for the Reason-Principle of
providence is god-serving.
All such right-doing, then, is linked to Providence; but it is not
therefore performed by it: men or other agents, living or lifeless, are
causes of certain things happening, and any good that may result is
taken up again by Providence. In the total, then, the right rules and
what has happened amiss is transformed and corrected. Thus, to take an
example from a single body, the Providence of a living organism implies
its health; let it be gashed or otherwise wounded, and that
Reason-Principle which governs it sets to work to draw it together,
knit it anew, heal it, and put the affected part to rights.
In sum, evil belongs to the sequence of things, but it comes from
necessity. It originates in ourselves; it has its causes no doubt, but
we are not, therefore, forced to it by Providence: some of these causes
we adapt to the operation of Providence and of its subordinates, but
with others we fail to make the connection; the act instead of being
ranged under the will of Providence consults the desire of the agent
alone or of some other element in the Universe, something which is
either itself at variance with Providence or has set up some such state
of variance in ourselves.
The one circumstance does not produce the same result wherever it acts;
the normal operation will be modified from case to case: Helen's beauty
told very differently on Paris and on Idomeneus; bring together two
handsome people of loose character and two living honourably and the
resulting conduct is very different; a good man meeting a libertine
exhibits a distinct phase of his nature and, similarly, the dissolute
answer to the society of their betters.
The act of the libertine is not done by Providence or in accordance
with Providence; neither is the action of the good done by Providence
-- it is done by the man -- but it is done in accordance with
Providence, for it is an act consonant with the Reason-Principle. Thus
a patient following his treatment is himself an agent and yet is acting
in accordance with the doctor's method inspired by the art concerned
with the causes of health and sickness: what one does against the laws
of health is one's act, but an act conflicting with the Providence of
medicine.
6. But, if all this be true, how can evil fall within the scope of
seership? The predictions of the seers are based on observation of the
Universal Circuit: how can this indicate the evil with the good?
Clearly the reason is that all contraries coalesce. Take, for example,
Shape and Matter: the living being [of the lower order] is a
coalescence of these two; so that to be aware of the Shape and the
Reason-Principle is to be aware of the Matter on which the Shape has
been imposed.
The living-being of the compound order is not present [as pure and
simple Idea] like the living being of the Intellectual order: in the
compound entity, we are aware, at once, of the Reason-Principle and of
the inferior element brought under form. Now the Universe is such a
compound living thing: to observe, therefore, its content is to be
aware not less of its lower elements than of the Providence which
operates within it.
This Providence reaches to all that comes into being; its scope
therefore includes living things with their actions and states, the
total of their history at once overruled by the Reason-Principle and
yet subject in some degree to Necessity.
These, then, are presented as mingled both by their initial nature and
by the continuous process of their existence; and the Seer is not able
to make a perfect discrimination setting on the one side Providence
with all that happens under Providence and on the other side what the
substrate communicates to its product. Such discrimination is not for a
man, not for a wise man or a divine man: one may say it is the
prerogative of a god. Not causes but facts lie in the Seer's province;
his art is the reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell of the
ordered and never condescend to the disorderly; the movement of the
Universe utters its testimony to him and, before men and things reveal
themselves, brings to light what severally and collectively they are.
Here conspires with There and There with Here, elaborating together the
consistency and eternity of a Kosmos and by their correspondences
revealing the sequence of things to the trained observer -- for every
form of divination turns upon correspondences. Universal
interdependence, there could not be, but universal resemblance there
must. This probably is the meaning of the saying that Correspondences
maintain the Universe.
This is a correspondence of inferior with inferior, of superior with
superior, eye with eye, foot with foot, everything with its fellow and,
in another order, virtue with right action and vice with
unrighteousness. Admit such correspondence in the All and we have the
possibility of prediction. If the one order acts on the other, the
relation is not that of maker to thing made -- the two are coeval -- it
is the interplay of members of one living being; each in its own place
and way moves as its own nature demands; to every organ its grade and
task, and to every grade and task its effective organ.
7. And since the higher exists, there must be the lower as well. The
Universe is a thing of variety, and how could there be an inferior
without a superior or a superior without an inferior? We cannot
complain about the lower in the higher; rather, we must be grateful to
the higher for giving something of itself to the lower.
In a word, those that would like evil driven out from the All would
drive out Providence itself.
What would Providence have to provide for? Certainly not for itself or
for the Good: when we speak of a Providence above, we mean an act upon
something below.
That which resumes all under a unity is a Principle in which all things
exist together and the single thing is All. From this Principle, which
remains internally unmoved, particular things push forth as from a
single root which never itself emerges. They are a branching into part,
into multiplicity, each single outgrowth bearing its trace of the
common source. Thus, phase by phase, there in finally the production
into this world; some things close still to the root, others widely
separate in the continuous progression until we have, in our metaphor,
bough and crest, foliage and fruit. At the one side all is one point of
unbroken rest, on the other is the ceaseless process, leaf and fruit,
all the things of process carrying ever within themselves the
Reason-Principles of the Upper Sphere, and striving to become trees in
their own minor order and producing, if at all, only what is in strict
gradation from themselves.
As for the abandoned spaces in what corresponds to the branches these
two draw upon the root, from which, despite all their variance, they
also derive; and the branches again operate upon their own furthest
extremities: operation is to be traced only from point to next point,
but, in the fact, there has been both inflow and outgo [of creative or
modifying force] at the very root which, itself again, has its priors.
The things that act upon each other are branchings from a far-off
beginning and so stand distinct; but they derive initially from the one
source: all interaction is like that of brothers, resemblant as drawing
life from the same parents.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
OUR TUTELARY SPIRIT.
1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at
rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; but,
in our view, the Soul generates by its motion, to which is due the
sensitive faculty -- that in any of its expression-forms -- Nature and
all forms of life down to the vegetable order. Even as it is present in
human beings the Soul carries its Expression-form [Hypostasis] with it,
but is not the dominant since it is not the whole man (humanity
including the Intellectual Principal, as well): in the vegetable order
it is the highest since there is nothing to rival it; but at this phase
it is no longer reproductive, or, at least, what it produces is of
quite another order; here life ceases; all later production is
lifeless.
What does this imply?
Everything the Soul engenders down to this point comes into being
shapeless, and takes form by orientation towards its author and
supporter: therefore the thing engendered on the further side can be no
image of the Soul, since it is not even alive; it must be an utter
Indetermination. No doubt even in things of the nearer order there was
indetermination, but within a form; they were undetermined not utterly
but only in contrast with their perfect state: at this extreme point we
have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its highest
degree and it becomes body by taking such shape as serves its scope;
then it becomes the recipient of its author and sustainer: this
presence in body is the only example of the boundaries of Higher
Existents running into the boundary of the Lower.
2. It is of this Soul especially that we read "All Soul has care for
the Soulless" -- though the several Souls thus care in their own degree
and way. The passage continues -- "Soul passes through the entire
heavens in forms varying with the variety of place" -- the sensitive
form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form -- and this means
that in each "place" the phase of the soul there dominant carries out
its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle.
Now, in humanity the lower is not supreme; it is an accompaniment; but
neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a
footing, and Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has
the organs of sensation, and in large part even by the merely
vegetative principle, for the body grows and propagates: all the graded
phases are in a collaboration, but the entire form, man, takes rank by
the dominant, and when the life-principle leaves the body it is what it
is, what it most intensely lived.
This is why we must break away towards the High: we dare not keep
ourselves set towards the sensuous principle, following the images of
sense, or towards the merely vegetative, intent upon the gratifications
of eating and procreation; our life must be pointed towards the
Intellective, towards the Intellectual-Principle, towards God.
Those that have maintained the human level are men once more. Those
that have lived wholly to sense become animals -- corresponding in
species to the particular temper of the life -- ferocious animals where
the sensuality has been accompanied by a certain measure of spirit,
gluttonous and lascivious animals where all has been appetite and
satiation of appetite. Those who in their pleasures have not even lived
by sensation, but have gone their way in a torpid grossness become mere
growing things, for this lethargy is the entire act of the vegetative,
and such men have been busy be-treeing themselves. Those, we read,
that, otherwise untainted, have loved song become vocal animals; kings
ruling unreasonably but with no other vice are eagles; futile and
flighty visionaries ever soaring skyward, become highflying birds;
observance of civic and secular virtue makes man again, or where the
merit is less marked, one of the animals of communal tendency, a bee or
the like.
3. What, then, is the spirit [guiding the present life and determining
the future]?
The Spirit of here and now.
And the God?
The God of here and now.
Spirit, God; This in act within us, conducts every life; for, even here
and now, it is the dominant of our Nature.
That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession
of the human being at birth?
No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides
inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the acting force is
that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational
Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is
the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the
working principle. The words "You shall yourselves choose" are true,
then; for by our life we elect our own loftier.
But how does this spirit come to be the determinant of our fate?
It is not when the life is ended that it conducts us here or there; it
operates during the lifetime; when we cease to live, our death hands
over to another principle this energy of our own personal career.
That principle [of the new birth] strives to gain control, and if it
succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit
[its next higher]: if on the contrary it is weighed down by the
developed evil in the character, the spirit of the previous life pays
the penalty: the evil-liver loses grade because during his life the
active principle of his being took the tilt towards the brute by force
of affinity. If, on the contrary, the Man is able to follow the leading
of his higher Spirit, he rises: he lives that Spirit; that noblest part
of himself to which he is being led becomes sovereign in his life; this
made his own, he works for the next above until he has attained the
height.
For the Soul is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to
the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked
to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to
the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in
that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are
fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation
towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our
diviner part not in itself diminished.
4. But is this lower extremity of our intellective phase fettered to
body for ever?
No: if we turn, this turns by the same act.
And the Soul of the All -- are we to think that when it turns from this
sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws?
No: for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself; it never knew
any coming, and therefore never came down; it remains unmoved above,
and the material frame of the Universe draws close to it, and, as it
were, takes light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it,
simply lying unmoved before it.
But has the Universe, then, no sensation? "It has no Sight," we read,
since it has no eyes, and obviously it has not ears, nostrils, or
tongue. Then has it perhaps such a consciousness as we have of our own
inner conditions?
No: where all is the working out of one nature, there is nothing but
still rest; there is not even enjoyment. Sensibility is present as the
quality of growth is, unrecognized. But the Nature of the World will be
found treated elsewhere; what stands here is all that the question of
the moment demands.
5. But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by
the Soul in the overworld, how can anything be left to our independent
action here?
The answer is that very choice in the over-world is merely an
allegorical statement of the Soul's tendency and temperament, a total
character which it must express wherever it operates.
But if the tendency of the Soul is the master-force and, in the Soul,
the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a
previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence
upon it? The Soul's quality exists before any bodily life; it has
exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never changes its
chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the
product of this life?
Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but
becomes the one or the other by force of act?
But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered
body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious?
The answer is that the Soul, to whichever side it inclines, has in some
varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own
temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the
entire decision of a Soul. Where we read that, after the casting of
lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances
attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance
with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the
real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted
conditions to their own particular quality.
The Timaeus indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves:
it is not entirely outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our
nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs to us as belonging
to our Soul, but not in so far as we are particular human beings living
a life to which it is superior: take the passage in this sense and it
is consistent; understand this Spirit otherwise and there is
contradiction. And the description of the Spirit, moreover, as "the
power which consummates the chosen life," is, also, in agreement with
this interpretation; for while its presidency saves us from falling
much deeper into evil, the only direct agent within us is some thing
neither above it nor equal to it but under it: Man cannot cease to be
characteristically Man.
6. What, then, is the achieved Sage?
One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul. It does
not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit [equivalent in
all men] as cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the
Intellective Principle [the diviner phase of the human Soul] which
therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding
spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.
But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual Principle as possessing
for presiding spirit the Prior to the Intellectual Principle: how then
does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that
he now is?
The failure is due to the disturbance caused by birth -- though, before
all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out
towards its own.
On instinct which the Sage finally rectifies in every respect?
Not in every respect: the Soul is so constituted that its life-history
and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but
also to the conditions among which it acts.
The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a Soul to the Underworld
ceases to be its guardian -- except when the Soul resumes [in its later
choice] the former state of life.
But, meanwhile, what happens to it?
From the passage [in the Phaedo] which tells how it presents the Soul
to judgement we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had
before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the
Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life -- a
time not so much of living as of expiation.
But the Souls that enter into brute bodies, are they controlled by some
thing less than this presiding Spirit? No: theirs is still a Spirit,
but an evil or a foolish one.
And the Souls that attain to the highest? Of these higher Souls some
live in the world of Sense, some above it: and those in the world of
Sense inhabit the Sun or another of the planetary bodies; the others
occupy the fixed Sphere [above the planetary] holding the place they
have merited through having lived here the superior life of reason.
We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual
Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of
the Kosmic Soul. The world Soul is distributed so as to produce the
fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded
powers: so with our Souls; they must have their provinces according to
their different powers, parallel to those of the World Soul: each must
give out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star
consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and
constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next
highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary
spirit.
But here some further precision is needed.
Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above,
have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and
all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with
them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is
vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for
it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division
among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes;
wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its
unity can always be reconstructed: when living things -- animal or
vegetal -- produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so
in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it
must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating
originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent
presence the life principle in plants for instance -- in other cases it
withdraws after imparting its virtue -- for instance where from the
putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is
produced from one organism.
A power corresponding to this in the All must reach down and co-operate
in the life of our world -- in fact the very same power.
If the Soul returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same
Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to live. With this Spirit
it embarks in the skiff of the universe: the "spindle of Necessity"
then takes control and appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of
the lot in life.
The Universal circuit is like a breeze, and the voyager, still or
stirring, is carried forward by it. He has a hundred varied
experiences, fresh sights, changing circumstances, all sorts of events.
The vessel itself furnishes incident, tossing as it drives on. And the
voyager also acts of himself in virtue of that individuality which he
retains because he is on the vessel in his own person and character.
Under identical circumstances individuals answer very differently in
their movements and acts: hence it comes about that, be the occurrences
and conditions of life similar or dissimilar, the result may differ
from man to man, as on the other hand a similar result may be produced
by dissimilar conditions: this (personal answer to incident) it is that
constitutes destiny.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
ON LOVE.
1. What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind? Or is it,
perhaps, sometimes to be thought of as a God or Spirit and sometimes
merely as an experience? And what is it essentially in each of these
respects?
These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing
opinions on the matter, the philosophical treatment it has received
and, especially, the theories of the great Plato who has many passages
dealing with Love, from a point of view entirely his own.
Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls; he also
makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the birth of Eros, under
definite circumstances and by a certain parentage.
Now everyone recognizes that the emotional state for which we make this
"Love" responsible rises in souls aspiring to be knit in the closest
union with some beautiful object, and that this aspiration takes two
forms, that of the good whose devotion is for beauty itself, and that
other which seeks its consummation in some vile act. But this generally
admitted distinction opens a new question: we need a philosophical
investigation into the origin of the two phases.
It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency
of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an
unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. The vile and ugly is in
clash, at once, with Nature and with God: Nature produces by looking to
the Good, for it looks towards Order -- which has its being in the
consistent total of the good, while the unordered is ugly, a member of
the system of evil -- and besides Nature itself, clearly, springs from
the divine realm, from Good and Beauty; and when anything brings
delight and the sense of kinship, its very image attracts.
Reject this explanation, and no one can tell how the mental state rises
and where are its causes: it is the explanation of even copulative love
which is the will to beget in beauty; Nature seeks to produce the
beautiful and therefore by all reason cannot desire to procreate in the
ugly.
Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the beauty
found on earth, the beauty of image and of body; it is because they are
strangers to the Archetype, the source of even the attraction they feel
towards what is lovely here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty is
a leading to the memory of that in the higher realm and these love the
earthly as an image; those that have not attained to this memory do not
understand what is happening within them, and take the image for the
reality. Once there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy
the beauty of earth; where appreciation degenerates into carnality,
there is sin.
Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether there is Reminiscence or not;
but there are those that feel, also, a desire of such immortality as
lies within mortal reach; and these are seeking Beauty in their demand
for perpetuity, the desire of the eternal; Nature teaches them to sow
the seed and to beget in beauty, to sow towards eternity, but in beauty
through their own kinship with the beautiful. And indeed the eternal is
of the one stock with the beautiful, the Eternal-Nature is the first
shaping of beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from it.
The less the desire for procreation, the greater is the contentment
with beauty alone, yet procreation aims at the engendering of beauty;
it is the expression of a lack; the subject is conscious of
insufficiency and, wishing to produce beauty, feels that the way is to
beget in a beautiful form. Where the procreative desire is lawless or
against the purposes of nature, the first inspiration has been natural,
but they have diverged from the way, they have slipped and fallen, and
they grovel; they neither understand whither Love sought to lead them
nor have they any instinct to production; they have not mastered the
right use of the images of beauty; they do not know what the Authentic
Beauty is.
Those that love beauty of person without carnal desire love for
beauty's sake; those that have -- for women, of course -- the
copulative love, have the further purpose of self-perpetuation: as long
as they are led by these motives, both are on the right path, though
the first have taken the nobler way. But, even in the right, there is
the difference that the one set, worshipping the beauty of earth, look
no further, while the others, those of recollection, venerate also the
beauty of the other world while they, still, have no contempt for this
in which they recognize, as it were, a last outgrowth, an attenuation
of the higher. These, in sum, are innocent frequenters of beauty, not
to be confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall
into the ugly -- for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into an
evil often.
So much for love, the state.
Now we have to consider Love, the God.
2. The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man,
merely; it is supported by Theologians and, over and over again, by
Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful
children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or
quickener of an already existing impulse thither. All this requires
philosophical examination. A cardinal passage is that in the Symposium
where we are told Eros was not a child of Aphrodite but born on the day
of Aphrodite's birth, Penia, Poverty, being the mother, and Poros,
Possession, the father.
The matter seems to demand some discussion of Aphrodite, since in any
case Eros is described as being either her son or in some association
with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and in what sense is Love either her
child or born with her or in some way both her child and her
birth-fellow?
To us Aphrodite is twofold; there is the heavenly Aphrodite, daughter
of Ouranos or Heaven: and there is the other the daughter of Zeus and
Dione, this is the Aphrodite who presides over earthly unions; the
higher was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages for in
Heaven there is no marrying.
The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos who is no other than the
Intellectual Principle -- must be the Soul at its divinest: unmingled
as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever Above, as
neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having
developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof,
so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter --
and therefore mythically "the unmothered" justly called not Celestial
Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within
itself.
Any Nature springing directly from the Intellectual Principle must be
itself also a clean thing: it will derive a resistance of its own from
its nearness to the Highest, for all its tendency, no less than its
fixity, centres upon its author whose power is certainly sufficient to
maintain it Above.
Soul then could never fall from its sphere; it is closer held to the
divine Mind than the very sun could hold the light it gives forth to
radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still.
But following upon Kronos -- or, if you will, upon Heaven, the father
of Kronos -- the Soul directs its Act towards him and holds closely to
him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to
look towards him. This Act of the Soul has produced an Hypostasis, a
Real-Being; and the mother and this Hypostasis -- her offspring, noble
Love gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus, is ever intent upon
that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and
that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what
loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first; before it
becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight; it
is first, therefore, and not even in the same order -- for desire
attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its
own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it.
3. That Love is a Hypostasis [a "Person"] a Real-Being sprung from a
Real-Being -- lower than the parent but authentically existent -- is
beyond doubt.
For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of
the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent
in the Real-Being of all that authentically is -- in the Real-Being
which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object
of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it
rejoiced in the looking; and the quality of what it saw was such that
the contemplation could not be void of effect; in virtue of that
rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of
its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of
itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a strenuous activity of
contemplation in the Soul; there is an emanation towards it from the
object contemplated; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled
with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its
name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this
horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an emotion, will take its name
from Love, the Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior to what
lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like
the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular act directed
towards a particular object; but it must not be confused with the
Absolute Love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal
Soul must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as being
of the household of that Soul, dependent upon that Soul, its very
offspring; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of
the Gods.
Once that Soul which is the primal source of light to the heavens is
recognized as an Hypostasis standing distinct and aloof it must be
admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so
loftily celestial a being as the Soul. Our own best we conceive as
inside ourselves and yet something apart; so, we must think of this
Love -- as essentially resident where the unmingling Soul inhabits.
But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at
once there is another Love -- the eye with which this second Soul looks
upwards -- like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This
Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe -- not Soul
unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to
the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love
presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward
desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards
the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in
so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For
every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and
that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine
Soul, and is its offspring.
4. Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love
in essence and substantial reality?
Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that of the Universe contain
such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal Soul
should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life.
This indwelling love is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told,
walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature.
It implants the characteristic desire; the particular Soul, strained
towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding
spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its Being.
As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be
allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single Soul holds to
the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together
constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds
to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the
individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul;
and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one
Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the
Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and
revealing itself at its will.
In the same way we must conceive many Aphrodites in the All, Spirits
entering it together with Love, all emanating from an Aphrodite of the
All, a train of particular Aphrodites dependent upon the first, and
each with the particular Love in attendance: this multiplicity cannot
be denied, if Soul be the mother of Love, and Aphrodite mean Soul, and
Love be an act of a Soul seeking good.
This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to The Good, is twofold:
the Love in the loftier Soul would be a god ever linking the Soul to
the divine; the Love in the mingling Soul will be a celestial spirit.
5. But what is the Nature of this Spirit -- of the Supernals in
general?
The Spirit-Kind is treated in the Symposium where, with much about the
others, we learn of Eros -- Love -- born to Penia -- Poverty -- and
Poros -- Possession -- who is son of Metis -- Resource -- at
Aphrodite's birth feast.
But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this Universe -- and not simply
the Love native within it -- involves much that is self-contradictory.
For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as
self-sufficing, while this "Love" is confessedly neither divine nor
self-sufficing but in ceaseless need.
Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to
Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily -- he a
constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man's Soul, if
the world is, similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is
identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love,
be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are
sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make
the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.
Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children: does this
apply to the Universe? Love is represented as homeless, bedless and
barefooted: would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and
quite out of the truth?
6. What then, in sum, is to be thought of Love and of his "birth" as we
are told of it?
Clearly we have to establish the significance, here, of Poverty and
Possession, and show in what way the parentage is appropriate: we have
also to bring these two into line with the other Supernals since one
spirit nature, one spirit essence, must characterize all unless they
are to have merely a name in common.
We must, therefore, lay down the grounds on which we distinguish the
Gods from the Celestials -- that is, when we emphasize the separate
nature of the two orders and are not, as often in practice, including
these Spirits under the common name of Gods.
It is our teaching and conviction that the Gods are immune to all
passion while we attribute experience and emotion to the Celestials
which, though eternal Beings and directly next to the Gods, are already
a step towards ourselves and stand between the divine and the human.
But by what process was the immunity lost? What in their nature led
them downwards to the inferior?
And other questions present themselves.
Does the Intellectual Realm include no member of this spirit order, not
even one? And does the Kosmos contain only these spirits, God being
confined to the Intellectual? Or are there Gods in the sub-celestial
too, the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and
the Powers down to the Moon being all Gods as well?
It is best not to use the word "Celestial" of any Being of that Realm;
the word "God" may be applied to the Essential-Celestial -- the
autodaimon -- and even to the Visible Powers of the Universe of Sense
down to the Moon; Gods, these too, visible, secondary, sequent upon the
Gods of the Intellectual Realm, consonant with Them, held about Them,
as the radiance about the star.
What, then, are these spirits?
A Celestial is the representative generated by each Soul when it enters
the Kosmos.
And why, by a Soul entering the Kosmos?
Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a
God; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite
the Pure Soul, as a God.
But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an
Eros, a Love? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods?
On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul
towards the good and beautiful is an Eros; and all the Souls within the
Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other Spirit-Beings, equally
born from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul,
have other functions: they are for the direct service of the All, and
administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire. The
Soul of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must
bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function
but to its entire charge.
But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what
Matter?
Certainly none in bodily Matter; that would make them simply living
things of the order of sense. And if, even, they are to invest
themselves in bodies of air or of fire, the nature must have already
been altered before they could have any contact with the corporeal. The
Pure does not mix, unmediated, with body -- though many think that the
Celestial-Kind, of its very essence, comports a body aerial or of fire.
But why should one order of Celestial descend to body and another not?
The difference implies the existence of some cause or medium working
upon such as thus descend. What would constitute such a medium?
We are forced to assume that there is a Matter of the Intellectual
Order, and that Beings partaking of it are thereby enabled to enter
into the lower Matter, the corporeal.
7. This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of Love.
The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar,
"wine yet not existing"; Love is born before the realm of sense has
come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the
lower image of that divine Realm had appeared; she dwelt in that
Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly of Form but partly
also of that indetermination which belongs to the Soul before she
attains the Good and when all her knowledge of Reality is a
fore-intimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this
state Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love.
This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but
a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated: the
offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not self-sufficient, but
unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving
and the self-sufficient Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle
but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration
ill-defined, unreasoned, unlimited -- it can never be sated as long as
it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love,
then, clings to the Soul, from which it sprung as from the principle of
its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the
Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended
with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but
through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad; it is without
resource in itself; even winning its end, it is poor again.
It cannot be satisfied because a thing of mixture never can be so: true
satisfaction is only for what has its plenitude in its own being; where
craving is due to an inborn deficiency, there may be satisfaction at
some given moment but it does not last. Love, then, has on the one side
the powerlessness of its native inadequacy, on the other the resource
inherited from the Reason-Kind.
Such must be the nature and such the origin of the entire Spirit Order,
each -- like its fellow, Love -- has its appointed sphere, is powerful
there, and wholly devoted to it, and, like Love, none is ever complete
of itself but always straining towards some good which it sees in
things of the partial sphere.
We understand, now, why good men have no other Love other Eros of life
-- than that for the Absolute and Authentic Good, and never follow the
random attractions known to those ranged under the lower Spirit Kind.
Each human being is set under his own Spirit-Guides, but this is mere
blank possession when they ignore their own and live by some other
spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the operative part of
the Soul in them. Those that go after evil are natures that have merged
all the Love-Principles within them in the evil desires springing in
their hearts and allowed the right reason, which belongs to our kind,
to fall under the spell of false ideas from another source.
All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good; in
a lesser Soul, inferior in rank and in scope; in the greater Soul,
superior; but all belong to the order of Being. Those forms of Love
that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending
on perversion: in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations
of any Reality; for they are no true issue of Soul; they are merely
accompaniments of a spiritual flaw which the Soul automatically
exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct.
In a word; all that is truly good in a Soul acting to the purposes of
nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything
else is alien, no act of the Soul, but merely something that happens to
it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which
there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the
eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true
knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence -- and this
not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is
occupied by the authentically knowable and by the
Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form.
In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the
authentic Intellective Act and of the authentically knowable object --
though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are not these in
the absolute and not exclusively these -- and hence our longing for
absolute things: it is the expression of our intellective activities:
if we sometimes care for the partial, that affection is not direct but
accidental, like our knowledge that a given triangular figure is made
up of two right angles because the absolute triangle is so.
8. But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into
which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered? And what is the garden?
We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros,
Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to
explain Zeus and his garden.
We cannot take Zeus to be the Soul, which we have agreed is represented
by Aphrodite.
Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus
of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader -- though elsewhere he seems to
rank him as one of three -- but in the Philebus he speaks more plainly
when he says that there is in Zeus not only a royal Soul, but also a
royal Intellect.
As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he
must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be
King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual
Principle. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him,
will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite [= the habra, delicate]
indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the
Soul.
And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and
the female gods to be their souls -- to every Intellectual Principle
its companion Soul -- we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the
Soul of Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and
Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call
Aphrodite's star the star of Hera.
9. This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle of all that
exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the supreme Intellect; but
being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch Soul, be in
Soul, [as the next lower principle].
For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect is native to it: nothing
enters from without; but "Poros intoxicated" is some Power deriving
satisfaction outside itself: what, then, can we understand by this
member of the Supreme filled with Nectar but a Reason-Principle falling
from a loftier essence to a lower? This means that the Reason-Principle
upon "the birth of Aphrodite" left the Intellectual for the Soul,
breaking into the garden of Zeus.
A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness
that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the Reason-Principle
within him; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine
Intellect upon the Divine Soul, which it has penetrated. What could the
Garden of Zeus indicate but the images of his Being and the splendours
of his glory? And what could these divine splendours and beauties be
but the Ideas streaming from him?
These Reason-Principles -- this Poros who is the lavishness, the
abundance of Beauty -- are at one and are made manifest; this is the
Nectar-drunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than
what the god-nature essentially demands; and this is the Reason pouring
down from the divine Mind.
The Intellectual Principle possesses Itself to satiety, but there is no
"drunken" abandonment in this possession which brings nothing alien to
it. But the Reason-Principle -- as its offspring, a later hypostasis --
is already a separate Being and established in another Realm, and so is
said to lie in the garden of this Zeus who is divine Mind; and this
lying in the garden takes place at the moment when, in our way of
speaking, Aphrodite enters the realm of Being.
10. "Our way of speaking" -- for myths, if they are to serve their
purpose, must necessarily import time-distinctions into their subject
and will often present as separate, Powers which exist in unity but
differ in rank and faculty; they will relate the births of the
unbegotten and discriminate where all is one substance; the truth is
conveyed in the only manner possible, it is left to our good sense to
bring all together again.
On this principle we have, here, Soul dwelling with the divine
Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to
satiety with the divine Ideas -- the beautiful abounding in all plenty,
so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of
whatever is lovely -- Soul which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while
in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names
of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the
over realm. The splendours contained in Soul are thought of as the
garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros
sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its
produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the
existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they
have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love -- "born at the
banquet of the gods" -- has of necessity been eternally in existence,
for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its Best, towards
the Good; as long as Soul has been, Love has been.
Still this Love is of mixed quality. On the one hand there is in it the
lack which keeps it craving: on the other, it is not entirely
destitute; the deficient seeks more of what it has, and certainly
nothing absolutely void of good would ever go seeking the good.
It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that
Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present
together in the Soul, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love.
Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this
Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor: the very ambition
towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack
of shape and of Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good, and
the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A
thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the
striving [with attainment] will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when
it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the
presentment of Matter to the incoming power.
Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same
time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from
its very birth, strives towards It.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE UNEMBODIED.
1. In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon
experience, action accompanied by judgement: the states, we hold, are
seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the
judgement resides in the Soul, and is distinct from the state -- for,
if it is not distinct, another judgement is demanded, one that is
distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever.
Still, this leaves it undecided whether in the act of judgement the
judging faculty does or does not take to itself something of its
object.
If the judging faculty does actually receive an imprint, then it
partakes of the state -- though what are called the Impressions may be
of quite another nature than is supposed; they may be like Thought,
that is to say they may be acts rather than states; there may be, here
too, awareness without participation.
For ourselves, it could never be in our system -- or in our liking --
to bring the Soul down to participation in such modes and modifications
as the warmth and cold of material frames.
What is known as the Impressionable faculty of the soul -- to
pathetikon -- would need to be identified: we must satisfy ourselves as
to whether this too, like the Soul as a unity, is to be classed as
immune or, on the contrary, as precisely the only part susceptible of
being affected; this question, however, may be held over; we proceed to
examine its preliminaries.
Even in the superior phase of the Soul -- that which precedes the
impressionable faculty and any sensation -- how can we reconcile
immunity with the indwelling of vice, false notions, ignorance?
Inviolability; and yet likings and dislikings, the Soul enjoying,
grieving, angry, grudging, envying, desiring, never at peace but
stirring and shifting with everything that confronts it!
If the Soul were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult,
indeed quite impossible, to make it appear to be immune, unchangeable,
when any of such emotions lodge in it. And even considering it as an
Authentic Being, devoid of magnitude and necessarily indestructible, we
must be very careful how we attribute any such experiences to it or we
will find ourselves unconsciously making it subject to dissolution. If
its essence is a Number or as we hold a Reason-Principle, under neither
head could it be susceptible of feeling. We can think, only, that it
entertains unreasoned reasons and experiences unexperienced, all
transmuted from the material frames, foreign and recognized only by
parallel, so that it possesses in a kind of non-possession and knows
affection without being affected. How this can be demands enquiry.
2. Let us begin with virtue and vice in the Soul. What has really
occurred when, as we say, vice is present? In speaking of extirpating
evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to
replace a former ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the Soul.
Now when we make virtue a harmony, and vice a breach of harmony, we
accept an opinion approved by the ancients; and the theory helps us
decidedly to our solution. For if virtue is simply a natural
concordance among the phases of the Soul, and vice simply a discord,
then there is no further question of any foreign presence; harmony
would be the result of every distinct phase or faculty joining in, true
to itself; discord would mean that not all chimed in at their best and
truest. Consider, for example, the performers in a choral dance; they
sing together though each one has his particular part, and sometimes
one voice is heard while the others are silent; and each brings to the
chorus something of his own; it is not enough that all lift their
voices together; each must sing, choicely, his own part to the music
set for him. Exactly so in the case of the Soul; there will be harmony
when each faculty performs its appropriate part.
Yes: but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the Soul must
depend upon a previous virtue, that of each several faculty within
itself; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the
vice of the single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual
presence of vice as they can be good only by the presence of virtue. It
is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with
ignorance in the reasoning faculty of the Soul; ignorance is not a
positive thing; but in the presence of false judgements -- the main
cause of vice -- must it not be admitted that something positive has
entered into the Soul, something perverting the reasoning faculty? So,
the initiative faculty; is it not, itself, altered as one varies
between timidity and boldness? And the desiring faculty, similarly, as
it runs wild or accepts control?
Our teaching is that when the particular faculty is sound it performs
the reasonable act of its essential nature, obeying the reasoning
faculty in it which derives from the Intellectual Principle and
communicates to the rest. And this following of reason is not the
acceptance of an imposed shape; it is like using the eyes; the Soul
sees by its act, that of looking towards reason. The faculty of sight
in the performance of its act is essentially what it was when it lay
latent; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the
relation that belongs to its essential character; it knows -- that is,
sees -- without suffering any change: so, precisely, the reasoning
phase of the Soul stands towards the Intellectual Principle; this it
sees by its very essence; this vision is its knowing faculty; it takes
in no stamp, no impression; all that enters it is the object of vision
-- possessed, once more, without possession; it possesses by the fact
of knowing but "without possession" in the sense that there is no
incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the
impression of the seal on sealing-wax.
And note that we do not appeal to stored-up impressions to account for
memory: we think of the mind awakening its powers in such a way as to
possess something not present to it.
Very good: but is it not different before and after acquiring the
memory?
Be it so; but it has suffered no change -- unless we are to think of
the mere progress from latency to actuality as change -- nothing has
been introduced into the mind; it has simply achieved the Act dictated
by its nature.
It is universally true that the characteristic Act of immaterial
entities is performed without any change in them -- otherwise they
would at last be worn away -- theirs is the Act of the unmoving; where
act means suffering change, there is Matter: an immaterial Being would
have no ground of permanence if its very Act changed it.
Thus in the case of Sight, the seeing faculty is in act but the
material organ alone suffers change: judgements are similar to visual
experiences.
But how explain the alternation of timidity and daring in the
initiative faculty?
Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the Reason-Principle
or by looking towards some inferior phase of it or by some defect in
the organs of action -- some lack or flaw in the bodily equipment -- or
by outside prevention of the natural act or by the mere absence of
adequate stimulus: boldness would arise from the reverse conditions:
neither implies any change, or even any experience, in the Soul.
So with the faculty of desire: what we call loose living is caused by
its acting unaccompanied; it has done all of itself; the other
faculties, whose business it is to make their presence felt in control
and to point the right way, have lain in abeyance; the Seer in the Soul
was occupied elsewhere, for, though not always at least sometimes, it
has leisure for a certain degree of contemplation of other concerns.
Often, moreover, the vice of the desiring faculty will be merely some
ill condition of the body, and its virtue, bodily soundness; thus there
would again be no question of anything imported into the Soul.
3. But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger
and pleasure, desire and fear -- are these not changes, affectings,
present and stirring within the Soul?
This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and
are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious facts. But,
while we recognize this, we must make very sure what it is that
changes. To represent the Soul or Mind as being the seat of these
emotions is not far removed from making it blush or turn pale; it is to
forget that while the Soul or Mind is the means, the effect takes place
in the distinct organism, the animated body.
At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul; but the body is
occupied by the Soul -- not to trouble about words -- is, at any rate,
close to it and very different from soulless matter; and so, is
affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. Fear begins in the mind;
the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in
pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the body; the
purely mental phase has not reached the point of sensation: the same is
true of pain. So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes
its rise; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows.
When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved -- as in desire,
reasoning, judging -- we do not mean that it is driven into its act;
these movements are its own acts.
In the same way when we call Life a movement we have no idea of a
changing substance; the naturally appropriate act of each member of the
living thing makes up the Life, which is, therefore, not a shifting
thing.
To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no
changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that
notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealing-wax; we thence
draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the
Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in essence, that virtue
and vice are not something imported into the Soul -- as heat and cold,
blackness or whiteness are importations into body -- but that, in all
this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively
contraries.
4. We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective
phase of the Soul. This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we
dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative
phase of the Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape
things to its choice: but more is required; we must begin by forming a
clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the Soul.
In general terms it means the centre about which we recognize the
affections to be grouped; and by affections we mean those states upon
which follow pleasure and pain.
Now among these affections we must distinguish. Some are pivoted upon
judgements; thus, a Man judging his death to be at hand may feel fear;
foreseeing some fortunate turn of events, he is happy: the opinion lies
in one sphere; the affection is stirred in another. Sometimes the
affections take the lead and automatically bring in the notion which
thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty: but as we have
explained, an act of opinion does not introduce any change into the
Soul or Mind: what happens is that from the notion of some impending
evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in
turn, becomes known in that part of the Mind which is said under such
circumstances to harbour fear.
But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind?
The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an
evil anticipated. It should, however, be quite clear that the Soul or
Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation -- both the higher
representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower
representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion
unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which,
as is believed, the "Nature" of common speech produces, unconsciously,
the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all
that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to
the body, belongs to the sense-order; trembling, pallor, inability to
speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the
being. The Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it
were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that case the trouble would
not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle,
oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited.
None the less, there is an affective phase of the Soul or Mind and this
is not corporeal; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form.
Now Matter is the one field of the desiring faculty, as of the
principles of nutrition growth and engendering, which are root and
spring to desire and to every other affection known to this Ideal-form.
No Ideal-form can be the victim of disturbance or be in any way
affected: it remains in tranquillity; only the Matter associated with
it can be affected by any state or experience induced by the movement
which its mere presence suffices to set up. Thus the vegetal Principle
induces vegetal life but it does not, itself, pass through the
processes of vegetation; it gives growth but it does not grow; in no
movement which it originates is it moved with the motion it induces; it
is in perfect repose, or, at least, its movement, really its act, is
utterly different from what it causes elsewhere.
The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity; it
operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody itself plucked the
strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative
cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the
stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently -- and it is a
question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement
operates from above or not -- but the affective phase itself remains
unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the
movement may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the
strings of his instrument, and once more, the Melodic Principle itself
is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the
musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under
dictation from the principle of Melody.
5. But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the Soul immune if it
is thus immune from the beginning?
Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase
and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance
is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts to an affection
and Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the
well-being of the Soul which by the mere absence of such a condition is
immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present.
Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances presented
before the Soul or Mind from without but taken [for practical purposes]
to be actual experiences within it -- then Philosophy's task is like
that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams,
and to this end recalls to waking condition the mind that is breeding
them.
But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been
stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body to which it is
essentially a stranger?
The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is
pure when it keeps no company; when it looks to nothing without itself;
when it entertains no alien thoughts -- be the mode or origin of such
notions or affections what they may, a subject on which we have already
touched -- when it no longer sees in the world of image, much less
elaborates images into veritable affections. Is it not a true
purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly things?
Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer
entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a light,
set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all.
In the particular case of the affective phase of the Soul, purification
is its awakening from the baseless visions which beset it, the refusal
to see them; its separation consists in limiting its descent towards
the lower and accepting no picture thence, and of course in the banning
for its part too of all which the higher Soul ignores when it has
arisen from the trouble storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by
the chains of sensuality and of multiplicity but has subdued to itself
the body and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignty,
tranquilly, over all.
6. The Intellectual Essence, wholly of the order of Ideal-form, must be
taken as impassive has been already established.
But Matter also is an incorporeal, though after a mode of its own; we
must examine, therefore, how this stands, whether it is passive, as is
commonly held, a thing that can be twisted to every shape and Kind, or
whether it too must be considered impassive and in what sense and
fashion so. But in engaging this question and defining the nature of
matter we must correct certain prevailing errors about the nature of
the Authentic Existent, about Essence, about Being.
The Existent -- rightly so called -- is that which has authentic
existence, that, therefore, which is existent completely, and
therefore, again, that which at no point fails in existence. Having
existence perfectly, it needs nothing to preserve it in being; it is,
on the contrary, the source and cause from which all that appears to
exist derives that appearance. This admitted, it must of necessity be
in life, in a perfect life: if it failed it would be more nearly the
nonexistent than the existent. But: The Being thus indicated is
Intellect, is wisdom unalloyed. It is, therefore, determined and
rounded off; it is nothing potentially that is not of the same
determined order, otherwise it would be in default.
Hence its eternity, its identity, its utter irreceptivity and
impermeability. If it took in anything, it must be taking in something
outside itself, that is to say, Existence would at last include
non-existence. But it must be Authentic Existence all through; it must,
therefore, present itself equipped from its own stores with all that
makes up Existence so that all stands together and all is one thing.
The Existent [Real Being] must have thus much of determination: if it
had not, then it could not be the source of the Intellectual Principle
and of Life which would be importations into it originating in the
sphere of non-Being; and Real Being would be lifeless and mindless; but
mindlessness and lifelessness are the characteristics of non-being and
must belong to the lower order, to the outer borders of the existent;
for Intellect and Life rise from the Beyond-Existence [the Indefinable
Supreme] -- though Itself has no need of them -- and are conveyed from
It into the Authentic Existent.
If we have thus rightly described the Authentic Existent, we see that
it cannot be any kind of body nor the under-stuff of body; in such
entities the Being is simply the existing of things outside of Being.
But body, a non-existence? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a
non-existence? Mountain and rock, the wide solid earth, all that
resists, all that can be struck and driven, surely all proclaims the
real existence of the corporeal? And how, it will be asked, can we, on
the contrary, attribute Being, and the only Authentic Being, to
entities like Soul and Intellect, things having no weight or pressure,
yielding to no force, offering no resistance, things not even visible?
Yet even the corporeal realm witnesses for us; the resting earth has
certainly a scantier share in Being than belongs to what has more
motion and less solidity -- and less than belongs to its own most
upward element, for fire begins, already, to flit up and away outside
of the body-kind.
In fact, it appears to be precisely the most self-sufficing that bear
least hardly, least painfully, on other things, while the heaviest and
earthiest bodies -- deficient, falling, unable to bear themselves
upward -- these, by the very down-thrust due to their feebleness, offer
the resistance which belongs to the falling habit and to the lack of
buoyancy. It is lifeless objects that deal the severest blows; they hit
hardest and hurt most; where there is life -- that is to say
participation in Being -- there is beneficence towards the environment,
all the greater as the measure of Being is fuller.
Again, Movement, which is a sort of life within bodies, an imitation of
true Life, is the more decided where there is the least of body a sign
that the waning of Being makes the object affected more distinctly
corporeal.
The changes known as affections show even more clearly that where the
bodily quality is most pronounced susceptibility is at its intensest --
earth more susceptible than other elements, and these others again more
or less so in the degree of their corporeality: sever the other
elements and, failing some preventive force, they join again; but
earthy matter divided remains apart indefinitely. Things whose nature
represents a diminishment have no power of recuperation after even a
slight disturbance and they perish; thus what has most definitely
become body, having most closely approximated to non-being lacks the
strength to reknit its unity: the heavy and violent crash of body
against body works destruction, and weak is powerful against weak,
non-being against its like.
Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and
resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth
in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word,
who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping
vision. The sphere of sense, the Soul in its slumber; for all of the
Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily
but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is
no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed; the
veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things; for these,
belonging to the Kind directly opposed to Soul, present to it what is
directly opposed to its essential existence: their origin, their flux,
and their perishing are the warning of their exclusion from the Kind
whose Being is Authentic.
7. We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter and
the things believed to be based upon it; investigation will show us
that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected.
Matter must be bodiless -- for body is a later production, a compound
made by Matter in conjunction with some other entity. Thus it is
included among incorporeal things in the sense that body is something
that is neither Real-Being nor Matter.
Matter is no Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no
Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; it is no limit or bound, for it
is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce?
It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no tide
to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and
this in the sense not of movement [away from Being] or station (in
Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the
image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial
existence; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it
is in itself invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where
no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting
contraries in the things based upon it; it is large and small, more and
less, deficient and excessive; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to
withdraw -- not even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it
failed to accept strength from the Intellectual Principle, so absolute
its lack of all Being.
Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie; it pretends to be great and
it is little, to be more and it is less; and the Existence with which
it masks itself is no Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of
all that seems to be present in it, phantasms within a phantasm; it is
like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are really
elsewhere, filled in appearance but actually empty, containing nothing,
pretending everything. Into it and out of it move mimicries of the
Authentic Existents, images playing upon an image devoid of Form,
visible against it by its very formlessness; they seem to modify it but
in reality effect nothing, for they are ghostly and feeble, have no
thrust and meet none in Matter either; they pass through it leaving no
cleavage, as through water; or they might be compared to shapes
projected so as to make some appearance upon what we can know only as
the Void.
Further: if visible objects were of the rank of the originals from
which they have entered into Matter we might believe Matter to be
really affected by them, for we might credit them with some share of
the power inherent in their Senders: but the objects of our experiences
are of very different virtue than the realities they represent, and we
deduce that the seeming modification of matter by visible things is
unreal since the visible thing itself is unreal, having at no point any
similarity with its source and cause. Feeble, in itself, a false thing
and projected upon a falsity, like an image in dream or against water
or on a mirror, it can but leave Matter unaffected; and even this is
saying too little, for water and mirror do give back a faithful image
of what presents itself before them.
8. It is a general principle that, to be modified, an object must be
opposed in faculty, and in quality to the forces that enter and act
upon it.
Thus where heat is present, the change comes by something that chills,
where damp by some drying agency: we say a subject is modified when
from warm it becomes cold, from dry wet.
A further evidence is in our speaking of a fire being burned out, when
it has passed over into another element; we do not say that the Matter
has been burned out: in other words, modification affects what is
subject to dissolution; the acceptance of modification is the path
towards dissolution; susceptibility to modification and susceptibility
to dissolution go necessarily together. But Matter can never be
dissolved. What into? By what process?
Still: Matter harbours heat, cold, qualities beyond all count; by these
it is differentiated; it holds them as if they were of its very
substance and they blend within it -- since no quality is found
isolated to itself -- Matter lies there as the meeting ground of all
these qualities with their changes as they act and react in the blend:
how, then, can it fail to be modified in keeping? The only escape would
be to declare Matter utterly and for ever apart from the qualities it
exhibits; but the very notion of Substance implies that any and every
thing present in it has some action upon it.
9. In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of
modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to
exist in another. There is a "presence" which acts by changing the
object -- for good or for ill -- as we see in the case of bodies,
especially where there is life. But there is also a "presence" which
acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we
have indicated in the case of the Soul. Then there is the case
represented by the stamping of a design upon wax, where the "presence"
of the added pattern causes no modification in the substance nor does
its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example of Light whose
presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object
illuminated. A stone becoming cold does not change its nature in the
process; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a
drawing for being coloured.
The intermediary mass on which these surface changes appear is
certainly not transmuted by them; but might there not be a modification
of the underlying Matter?
No: it is impossible to think of Matter being modified by, for
instance, colour -- for, of course we must not talk of modification
when there is no more than a presence, or at most a presenting of
shape.
Mirrors and transparent objects, even more, offer a close parallel;
they are quite unaffected by what is seen in or through them: material
things are reflections, and the Matter on which they appear is further
from being affected than is a mirror. Heat and cold are present in
Matter, but the Matter itself suffers no change of temperature: growing
hot and growing cold have to do only with quality; a quality enters and
brings the impassible Substance under a new state -- though, by the
way, research into nature may show that cold is nothing positive but an
absence, a mere negation. The qualities come together into Matter, but
in most cases they can have no action upon each other; certainly there
can be none between those of unlike scope: what effect, for example,
could fragrance have on sweetness or the colour-quality on the quality
of form, any quality on another of some unrelated order? The
illustration of the mirror may well indicate to us that a given
substratum may contain something quite distinct from itself -- even
something standing to it as a direct contrary -- and yet remain
entirely unaffected by what is thus present to it or merged into it.
A thing can be hurt only by something related to it, and similarly
things are not changed or modified by any chance presence: modification
comes by contrary acting upon contrary; things merely different leave
each other as they were. Such modification by a direct contrary can
obviously not occur in an order of things to which there is no
contrary: Matter, therefore [the mere absence of Reality] cannot be
modified: any modification that takes place can occur only in some
compound of Matter and reality, or, speaking generally, in some
agglomeration of actual things. The Matter itself -- isolated, quite
apart from all else, utterly simplex -- must remain immune, untouched
in the midst of all the interacting agencies; just as when people fight
within their four walls, the house and the air in it remain without
part in the turmoil.
We may take it, then, that while all the qualities and entities that
appear upon Matter group to produce each the effect belonging to its
nature, yet Matter itself remains immune, even more definitely immune
than any of those qualities entering into it which, not being
contraries, are not affected by each other.
10. Further: If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must
acquire something by the incoming of the new state; it will either
adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way different from
what it was. Now upon this first incoming quality suppose a second to
supervene; the recipient is no longer Matter but a modification of
Matter: this second quality, perhaps, departs, but it has acted and
therefore leaves something of itself after it; the substratum is still
further altered. This process proceeding, the substratum ends by
becoming something quite different from Matter; it becomes a thing
settled in many modes and many shapes; at once it is debarred from
being the all-recipient; it will have closed the entry against many
incomers. In other words, the Matter is no longer there: Matter is
destructible.
No: if there is to be a Matter at all, it must be always identically as
it has been from the beginning: to speak of Matter as changing is to
speak of it as not being Matter.
Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing changing
must remain within its constitutive Idea so that the alteration is only
in the accidents and not in the essential thing; the changing object
must retain this fundamental permanence, and the permanent substance
cannot be the member of it which accepts modification.
Therefore there are only two possibilities: the first, that Matter
itself changes and so ceases to be itself, the second that it never
ceases to be itself and therefore never changes.
We may be answered that it does not change in its character as Matter:
but no one could tell us in what other character it changes; and we
have the admission that the Matter in itself is not subject to change.
Just as the Ideal Principles stand immutably in their essence -- which
consists precisely in their permanence -- so, since the essence of
Matter consists in its being Matter [the substratum to all material
things] it must be permanent in this character; because it is Matter,
it is immutable. In the Intellectual realm we have the immutable Idea;
here we have Matter, itself similarly immutable.
11. I think, in fact, that Plato had this in mind where he justly
speaks of the Images of Real Existents "entering and passing out":
these particular words are not used idly: he wishes us to grasp the
precise nature of the relation between Matter and the Ideas.
The difficulty on this point is not really that which presented itself
to most of our predecessors -- how the Ideas enter into Matter -- it is
rather the mode of their presence in it.
It is in fact strange at sight that Matter should remain itself intact,
unaffected by Ideal-forms present within it, especially seeing that
these are affected by each other. It is surprising, too, that the
entrant Forms should regularly expel preceding shapes and qualities,
and that the modification [which cannot touch Matter] should affect
what is a compound [of Idea with Matter] and this, again, not a
haphazard but precisely where there is need of the incoming or outgoing
of some certain Ideal-form, the compound being deficient through the
absence of a particular principle whose presence will complete it.
But the reason is that the fundamental nature of Matter can take no
increase by anything entering it, and no decrease by any withdrawal:
what from the beginning it was, it remains. It is not like those things
whose lack is merely that of arrangement and order which can be
supplied without change of substance as when we dress or decorate
something bare or ugly.
But where the bringing to order must cut through to the very nature,
the base original must be transmuted: it can leave ugliness for beauty
only by a change of substance. Matter, then, thus brought to order must
lose its own nature in the supreme degree unless its baseness is an
accidental: if it is base in the sense of being Baseness the Absolute,
it could never participate in order, and, if evil in the sense of being
Evil the Absolute, it could never participate in good.
We conclude that Matter's participation in Idea is not by way of
modification within itself: the process is very different; it is a bare
seeming. Perhaps we have here the solution of the difficulty as to how
Matter, essentially evil, can be reaching towards The Good: there would
be no such participation as would destroy its essential nature. Given
this mode of pseudo-participation -- in which Matter would, as we say,
retain its nature, unchanged, always being what it has essentially been
-- there is no longer any reason to wonder as to how while essentially
evil, it yet participates in Idea: for, by this mode, it does not
abandon its own character: participation is the law, but it
participates only just so far as its essence allows. Under a mode of
participation which allows it to remain on its own footing, its
essential nature stands none the less, whatsoever the Idea, within that
limit, may communicate to it: it is by no means the less evil for
remaining immutably in its own order. If it had authentic participation
in The Good and were veritably changed, it would not be essentially
evil.
In a word, when we call Matter evil we are right only if we mean that
it is not amenable to modification by The Good; but that means simply
that it is subject to no modification whatever.
12. This is Plato's conception: to him participation does not, in the
case of Matter, comport any such presence of an Ideal-form in a
Substance to be shaped by it as would produce one compound thing made
up of the two elements changing at the same moment, merging into one
another, modified each by the other.
In his haste to his purpose he raises many difficult questions, but he
is determined to disown that view; he labours to indicate in what mode
Matter can receive the Ideal-forms without being, itself, modified. The
direct way is debarred since it is not easy to point to things actually
present in a base and yet leaving that base unaffected: he therefore
devises a metaphor for participation without modification, one which
supports, also, his thesis that all appearing to the senses is void of
substantial existence and that the region of mere seeming is vast.
Holding, as he does, that it is the patterns displayed upon Matter that
cause all experience in living bodies while the Matter itself remains
unaffected, he chooses this way of stating its immutability, leaving us
to make out for ourselves that those very patterns impressed upon it do
not comport any experience, any modification, in itself.
In the case, no doubt, of the living bodies that take one pattern or
shape after having borne another, it might be said that there was a
change, the variation of shape being made verbally equivalent to a real
change: but since Matter is essentially without shape or magnitude, the
appearing of shape upon it can by no freedom of phrase be described as
a change within it. On this point one must have "a rule for thick and
thin" one may safely say that the underlying Kind contains nothing
whatever in the mode commonly supposed.
But if we reject even the idea of its really containing at least the
patterns upon it, how is it, in any sense, a recipient?
The answer is that in the metaphor cited we have some reasonably
adequate indication of the impassibility of Matter coupled with the
presence upon it of what may be described as images of things not
present.
But we cannot leave the point of its impassibility without a warning
against allowing ourselves to be deluded by sheer custom of speech.
Plato speaks of Matter as becoming dry, wet, inflamed, but we must
remember the words that follow: "and taking the shape of air and of
water": this blunts the expressions "becoming wet, becoming inflamed";
once we have Matter thus admitting these shapes, we learn that it has
not itself become a shaped thing but that the shapes remain distinct as
they entered. We see, further, that the expression "becoming inflamed"
is not to be taken strictly: it is rather a case of becoming fire.
Becoming fire is very different from becoming inflamed, which implies
an outside agency and, therefore, susceptibility to modification.
Matter, being itself a portion of fire, cannot be said to catch fire.
To suggest that the fire not merely permeates the matter, but actually
sets it on fire is like saying that a statue permeates its bronze.
Further, if what enters must be an Ideal-Principle how could it set
Matter aflame? But what if it is a pattern or condition? No: the object
set aflame is so in virtue of the combination of Matter and condition.
But how can this follow on the conjunction when no unity has been
produced by the two?
Even if such a unity had been produced, it would be a unity of things
not mutually sharing experiences but acting upon each other. And the
question would then arise whether each was effective upon the other or
whether the sole action was not that of one (the form) preventing the
other [the Matter] from slipping away?
But when any material thing is severed, must not the Matter be divided
with it? Surely the bodily modification and other experience that have
accompanied the sundering, must have occurred, identically, within the
Matter?
This reasoning would force the destructibility of Matter upon us: "the
body is dissolved; then the Matter is dissolved." We would have to
allow Matter to be a thing of quantity, a magnitude. But since it is
not a magnitude it could not have the experiences that belong to
magnitude and, on the larger scale, since it is not body it cannot know
the experiences of body.
In fact those that declare Matter subject to modification may as well
declare it body right out.
13. Further, they must explain in what sense they hold that Matter
tends to slip away from its form [the Idea]. Can we conceive it
stealing out from stones and rocks or whatever else envelops it?
And of course they cannot pretend that Matter in some cases rebels and
sometimes not. For if once it makes away of its own will, why should it
not always escape? If it is fixed despite itself, it must be enveloped
by some Ideal-Form for good and all. This, however, leaves still the
question why a given portion of Matter does not remain constant to any
one given form: the reason lies mainly in the fact that the Ideas are
constantly passing into it.
In what sense, then, is it said to elude form?
By very nature and for ever?
But does not this precisely mean that it never ceases to be itself, in
other words that its one form is an invincible formlessness? In no
other sense has Plato's dictum any value to those that invoke it.
Matter [we read] is "the receptacle and nurse of all generation."
Now if Matter is such a receptacle and nurse, all generation is
distinct from it; and since all the changeable lies in the realm of
generation, Matter, existing before all generation, must exist before
all change.
"Receptacle" and "nurse"; then it "retains its identity; it is not
subject to modification. Similarly if it is" [as again we read] "the
ground on which individual things appear and disappear," and so, too,
if it is a "place, a base." Where Plato describes and identifies it as
"a ground to the ideas" he is not attributing any state to it; he is
probing after its distinctive manner of being.
And what is that?
This which we think of as a Nature-Kind cannot be included among
Existents but must utterly rebel from the Essence of Real Beings and be
therefore wholly something other than they -- for they are
Reason-Principles and possess Authentic Existence -- it must
inevitably, by virtue of that difference, retain its integrity to the
point of being permanently closed against them and, more, of rejecting
close participation in any image of them.
Only on these terms can it be completely different: once it took any
Idea to hearth and home, it would become a new thing, for it would
cease to be the thing apart, the ground of all else, the receptacle of
absolutely any and every form. If there is to be a ceaseless coming
into it and going out from it, itself must be unmoved and immune in all
the come and go. The entrant Idea will enter as an image, the untrue
entering the untruth.
But, at least, in a true entry?
No: How could there be a true entry into that which, by being falsity,
is banned from ever touching truth?
Is this then a pseudo-entry into a pseudo-entity -- something merely
brought near, as faces enter the mirror, there to remain just as long
as the people look into it?
Yes: if we eliminated the Authentic Existents from this Sphere nothing
of all now seen in sense would appear one moment longer.
Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an Ideal-Form of a
Kind [has some degree of Real Being]; but bare Matter, which is no
Idea, is not a visible thing; if it were, it would have been visible in
its own character before anything else appeared upon it. The condition
of Matter may be illustrated by that of air penetrated by light and
remaining, even so, unseen because it is invisible whatever happens.
The reflections in the mirror are not taken to be real, all the less
since the appliance on which they appear is seen and remains while the
images disappear, but Matter is not seen either with the images or
without them. But suppose the reflections on the mirror remaining and
the mirror itself not seen, we would never doubt the solid reality of
all that appears.
If, then, there is, really, something in a mirror, we may suppose
objects of sense to be in Matter in precisely that way: if in the
mirror there is nothing, if there is only a seeming of something, then
we may judge that in Matter there is the same delusion and that the
seeming is to be traced to the Substantial-Existence of the
Real-Beings, that Substantial-Existence in which the Authentic has the
real participation while only an unreal participation can belong to the
unauthentic since their condition must differ from that which they
would know if the parts were reversed, if the Authentic Existents were
not and they were.
14. But would this mean that if there were no Matter nothing would
exist?
Precisely as in the absence of a mirror, or something of similar power,
there would be no reflection.
A thing whose very nature is to be lodged in something else cannot
exist where the base is lacking -- and it is the character of a
reflection to appear in something not itself.
Of course supposing anything to desert from the Authentic Beings, this
would not need an alien base: but these Beings are not subject to flux,
and therefore any outside manifestation of them implies something other
than themselves, something offering a base to what never enters,
something which by its presence, in its insistence, by its cry for
help, in its beggardom, strives as it were by violence to acquire and
is always disappointed, so that its poverty is enduring, its cry
unceasing.
This alien base exists and the myth represents it as a pauper to
exhibit its nature, to show that Matter is destitute of The Good. The
claimant does not ask for all the Giver's store, but it welcomes
whatever it can get; in other words, what appears in Matter is not
Reality.
The name, too [Poverty], conveys that Matter's need is never met. The
union with Poros, Possession, is designed to show that Matter does not
attain to Reality, to Plenitude, but to some bare sufficiency -- in
point of fact to imaging skill.
It is, of course, impossible that an outside thing belonging in any
degree to Real-Being -- whose Nature is to engender Real-Beings --
should utterly fail of participation in Reality: but here we have
something perplexing; we are dealing with utter Non-Being, absolutely
without part in Reality; what is this participation by the
non-participant, and how does mere neighbouring confer anything on that
which by its own nature is precluded from any association?
The answer is that all that impinges upon this Non-Being is flung back
as from a repelling substance; we may think of an Echo returned from a
repercussive plane surface; it is precisely because of the lack of
retention that the phenomenon is supposed to belong to that particular
place and even to arise there.
If Matter were participant and received Reality to the extent which we
are apt to imagine, it would be penetrated by a Reality thus sucked
into its constitution. But we know that the Entrant is not thus
absorbed: Matter remains as it was, taking nothing to itself: it is the
check to the forthwelling of Authentic Existence; it is a ground that
repels; it is a mere receptacle to the Realities as they take their
common path and here meet and mingle. It resembles those reflecting
vessels, filled with water, which are often set against the sun to
produce fire: the heat rays -- prevented, by their contrary within,
from being absorbed -- are flung out as one mass.
It is in this sense and way that Matter becomes the cause of the
generated realm; the combinations within it hold together only after
some such reflective mode.
15. Now the objects attracting the sun-rays to themselves --
illuminated by a fire of the sense-order -- are necessarily of the
sense-order; there is perceptibility because there has been a union of
things at once external to each other and continuous, contiguous, in
direct contact, two extremes in one line. But the Reason-Principle
operating upon Matter is external to it only in a very different mode
and sense: exteriority in this case is amply supplied by contrariety of
essence and can dispense with any opposite ends [any question of lineal
position]; or, rather, the difference is one that actually debars any
local extremity; sheer incongruity of essence, the utter failure in
relationship, inhibits admixture [between Matter and any form of
Being].
The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant
principle neither possesses it nor is possessed by it. Consider, as an
example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in
the mind; there is no admixture; the notion that came goes in its time,
still integrally itself alone, taking nothing with it, leaving nothing
after it, because it has not been blended with the mind; there is no
"outside" in the sense of contact broken, and the distinction between
base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the reason.
In that example, no doubt, the mental representation -- though it seems
to have a wide and unchecked control -- is an image, while the Soul
[Mind] is in its nature not an image [but a Reality]: none the less the
Soul or Mind certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some
analogous relation. The representation, however, does not cover the
Mind over; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there;
however urgently it presses in, it never effects such an obliteration
as to be taken for the Soul; it is confronted there by indwelling
powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack.
Matter -- feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and
possessing no phase of the Authentic Existents, not even in possession
of its own falsity -- lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter
void as it is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but
it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating thought may arrive at
it, discriminating it from Authentic Existence; then, it is discerned
as something abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest
semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every shape and property
and appearing to follow -- yet in fact not even following.
16. An Ideal-Principle approaches and leads Matter towards some desired
dimension, investing this non-existent underlie with a magnitude from
itself which never becomes incorporate -- for Matter, if it really
incorporated magnitude, would be a mass.
Eliminate this Ideal-Form and the substratum ceases to be a thing of
magnitude, or to appear so: the mass produced by the Idea was, let us
suppose, a man or a horse; the horse-magnitude came upon the Matter
when a horse was produced upon it; when the horse ceases to exist upon
the Matter, the magnitude of the horse departs also. If we are told
that the horse implies a certain determined bulk and that this bulk is
a permanent thing, we answer that what is permanent in this case is not
the magnitude of the horse but the magnitude of mass in general. That
same Magnitude might be fire or earth; on their disappearance their
particular magnitudes would disappear with them. Matter, then, can
never take to itself either pattern or magnitude; if it did, it would
no longer be able to turn from being fire, let us say, into being
something else; it would become and be fire once for all.
In a word, though Matter is far extended -- so vastly as to appear
co-extensive with all this sense-known Universe -- yet if the Heavens
and their content came to an end, all magnitude would simultaneously
pass from Matter with, beyond a doubt, all its other properties; it
would be abandoned to its own Kind, retaining nothing of all that
which, in its own peculiar mode, it had hitherto exhibited.
Where an entrant force can effect modification it will inevitably leave
some trace upon its withdrawal; but where there can be no modification,
nothing can be retained; light comes and goes, and the air is as it
always was.
That a thing essentially devoid of magnitude should come to a certain
size is no more astonishing than that a thing essentially devoid of
heat should become warm: Matter's essential existence is quite separate
from its existing in bulk, since, of course, magnitude is an immaterial
principle as pattern is. Besides, if we are not to reduce Matter to
nothing, it must be all things by way of participation, and Magnitude
is one of those all things.
In bodies, necessarily compounds, Magnitude though not a determined
Magnitude must be present as one of the constituents; it is implied in
the very notion of body; but Matter -- not a Body -- excludes even
undetermined Magnitude.
17. Nor can we, on the other hand, think that matter is simply Absolute
Magnitude.
Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-Principle:
it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The
fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or
of the All-Soul, desires expansion [and thereby engenders secondaries]:
in its images -- aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating
its act -- is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in
their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency
of the Image-making phase [of Intellect or All-Soul] runs forth into
the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the
process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the Supreme,
thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter -- which
never possesses a content -- to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It
must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a
thing [Matter] not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and
has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth
a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has
Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe.
The Magnitude inherent in each Ideal-Principle -- that of a horse or of
anything else -- combines with Magnitude the Absolute with the result
that, irradiated by that Absolute, Matter entire takes Magnitude and
every particle of it becomes a mass; in this way, by virtue at once of
the totality of Idea with its inherent magnitude and of each several
specific Idea, all things appear under mass; Matter takes on what we
conceive as extension; it is compelled to assume a relation to the All
and, gathered under this Idea and under Mass, to be all things -- in
the degree in which the operating power can lead the really nothing to
become all.
By the conditions of Manifestation, colour rises from non-colour [=
from the colourless prototype of colour in the Ideal Realm]. Quality,
known by the one name with its parallel in the sphere of Primals,
rises, similarly, from non-quality: in precisely the same mode, the
Magnitude appearing upon Matter rises from non-Magnitude or from that
Primal which is known to us by the same name; so that material things
become visible through standing midway between bare underlie and Pure
Idea. All is perceptible by virtue of this origin in the Intellectual
Sphere but all is falsity since the base in which the manifestation
takes place is a non-existent.
Particular entities thus attain their Magnitude through being drawn out
by the power of the Existents which mirror themselves and make space
for themselves in them. And no violence is required to draw them into
all the diversity of Shapes and Kinds because the phenomenal All exists
by Matter [by Matter's essential all-receptivity] and because each
several Idea, moreover, draws Matter its own way by the power stored
within itself, the power it holds from the Intellectual Realm. Matter
is manifested in this sphere as Mass by the fact that it mirrors the
Absolute Magnitude; Magnitude here is the reflection in the mirror. The
Ideas meet all of necessity in Matter [the Ultimate of the emanatory
progress]: and Matter, both as one total thing and in its entire scope,
must submit itself, since it is the Material of the entire Here, not of
any one determined thing: what is, in its own character, no determined
thing may become determined by an outside force -- though, in becoming
thus determined, it does not become the definite thing in question, for
thus it would lose its own characteristic indetermination.
18. The Ideal Principle possessing the Intellection [= Idea, Noesis] of
Magnitude -- assuming that this Intellection is of such power as not
merely to subsist within itself but to be urged outward as it were by
the intensity of its life -- will necessarily realize itself in a Kind
[= Matter] not having its being in the Intellective Principle, not
previously possessing the Idea of Magnitude or any trace of that Idea
or any other.
What then will it produce [in this Matter] by virtue of that power?
Not horse or cow: these are the product of other Ideas.
No: this Principle comes from the source of Magnitude [= is primal
"Magnitude"] and therefore Matter can have no extension, in which to
harbour the Magnitude of the Principle, but can take in only its
reflected appearance.
To the thing which does not enjoy Magnitude in the sense of having
mass-extension in its own substance and parts, the only possibility is
that it present some partial semblance of Magnitude, such as being
continuous, not here and there and everywhere, that its parts be
related within it and ungapped. An adequate reflection of a great mass
cannot be produced in a small space -- mere size prevents -- but the
greater, pursuing the hope of that full self-presentment, makes
progress towards it and brings about a nearer approach to adequate
mirroring in the parallel from which it can never withhold its
radiation: thus it confers Magnitude upon that [= Matter] which has
none and cannot even muster up the appearance of having any, and the
visible resultant exhibits the Magnitude of mass.
Matter, then, wears Magnitude as a dress thrown about it by its
association with that Absolute Magnitude to whose movement it must
answer; but it does not, for that, change its Kind; if the Idea which
has clothed it were to withdraw, it would once again be what it
permanently is, what it is by its own strength, or it would have
precisely the Magnitude lent to it by any other form that happens to be
present in it.
The [Universal] Soul -- containing the Ideal Principles of Real-Beings,
and itself an Ideal Principle -- includes all in concentration within
itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is
complete and self-contained: it, therefore, sees these principles of
sensible things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and
advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it
cannot depart from its Kind; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass.
Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no
Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active
power may choose to send. In what is thus sent, from the
Reason-Principle in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained
a degree of the partial object that is to be formed: in the
image-making impulse within the Reason-Principle there is already a
step [towards the lower manifestation] or we may put it that the
downward movement from the Reason-Principle is a first form of the
partial: utter absence of partition would mean no movement but
[sterile] repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in
concentration as the Soul is: if it were so, it would belong to the
Intellective Sphere. It must be all-recipient but not in that partless
mode. It is to be the Place of all things, and it must therefore extend
universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval: thus it
will be a thing unconfined to any moment [of space or time] but laid
out in submission to all that is to be.
But would we not expect that some one particularized form should occupy
Matter [at once] and so exclude such others as are not able to enter
into combination?
No: for there is no first Idea except the Ideal Principle of the
Universe -- and, by this Idea, Matter is [the seat of] all things at
once and of the particular thing in its parts -- for the Matter of a
living being is disparted according to the specific parts of the
organism: if there were no such partition nothing would exist but the
Reason-Principle.
19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother [to be
"born into the Universe"] affect it neither for better nor for worse.
Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers
conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata --
which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms -- Heat
[the Principle] annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the
opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is affected
which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of
self-identity.
In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified
according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change:
in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations,
in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily,
the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the
more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. [Body is modified: Mind
knows] but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold
leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated
with it as friend or enemy.
So the appellation "Recipient and Nurse" is the better description:
Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting
power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a
Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing
to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food.
But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not
in its quality as Matter but as being an Ideal-Form; for only the Idea
is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile.
This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and
mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the generative
organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of
things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle: the sterility of
Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it
in its representation as the All-Mother.
This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that
it is the source of things in the sense of being their underlie: it is
an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no
intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those
not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a precisely true
presentment; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they
indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in
receptivity only, not in pregnancy: this they accomplish by exhibiting
Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male,
but castrated of that impregnating power which belongs only to the
unchangeably masculine.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
TIME AND ETERNITY.
1. Eternity and Time; two entirely separate things, we explain "the one
having its being in the everlasting Kind, the other in the realm of
Process, in our own Universe"; and, by continually using the words and
assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to
think that, both by instinct and by the more detailed attack of
thought, we hold an adequate experience of them in our minds without
more ado.
When, perhaps, we make the effort to clarify our ideas and close into
the heart of the matter we are at once unsettled: our doubts throw us
back upon ancient explanations; we choose among the various theories,
or among the various interpretations of some one theory, and so we come
to rest, satisfied, if only we can counter a question with an approved
answer, and glad to be absolved from further enquiry.
Now, we must believe that some of the venerable philosophers of old
discovered the truth; but it is important to examine which of them
really hit the mark and by what guiding principle we can ourselves
attain to certitude.
What, then, does Eternity really mean to those who describe it as
something different from Time? We begin with Eternity, since when the
standing Exemplar is known, its representation in image -- which Time
is understood to be -- will be clearly apprehended -- though it is of
course equally true, admitting this relationship to Time as image to
Eternity the original, that if we chose to begin by identifying Time we
could thence proceed upwards by Recognition [the Platonic Anamnesis]
and become aware of the Kind which it images.
2. What definition are we to give to Eternity?
Can it be identified with the [divine or] Intellectual Substance
itself?
This would be like identifying Time with the Universe of Heavens and
Earth -- an opinion, it is true, which appears to have had its
adherents. No doubt we conceive, we know, Eternity as something most
august; most august, too, is the Intellectual Kind; and there is no
possibility of saying that the one is more majestic than the other,
since no such degrees can be asserted in the Above-World; there is
therefore a certain excuse for the identification -- all the more since
the Intellectual Substance and Eternity have the one scope and content.
Still; by the fact of representing the one as contained within the
other, by making Eternity a predicate to the Intellectual Existents --
"the Nature of the Exemplar," we read, "is eternal" -- we cancel the
identification; Eternity becomes a separate thing, something
surrounding that Nature or lying within it or present to it. And the
majestic quality of both does not prove them identical: it might be
transmitted from the one to the other. So, too, Eternity and the Divine
Nature envelop the same entities, yes; but not in the same way: the
Divine may be thought of as enveloping parts, Eternity as embracing its
content in an unbroken whole, with no implication of part, but merely
from the fact that all eternal things are so by conforming to it.
May we, perhaps, identify Eternity with Repose-There as Time has been
identified with Movement-Here?
This would bring on the counter-question whether Eternity is presented
to us as Repose in the general sense or as the Repose that envelops the
Intellectual Essence.
On the first supposition we can no more talk of Repose being eternal
than of Eternity being eternal: to be eternal is to participate in an
outside thing, Eternity.
Further, if Eternity is Repose, what becomes of Eternal Movement,
which, by this identification, would become a thing of Repose?
Again, the conception of Repose scarcely seems to include that of
perpetuity -- I am speaking of course not of perpetuity in the
time-order (which might follow on absence of movement) but of that
which we have in mind when we speak of Eternity.
If, on the other hand, Eternity is identified with the Repose of the
divine Essence, all species outside of the divine are put outside of
Eternity.
Besides, the conception of Eternity requires not merely Repose but also
unity -- and, in order to keep it distinct from Time, a unity including
interval -- but neither that unity nor that absence of interval enters
into the conception of Repose as such.
Lastly, this unchangeable Repose in unity is a predicate asserted of
Eternity, which, therefore, is not itself Repose, the absolute, but a
participant in Repose.
3. What, then, can this be, this something in virtue of which we
declare the entire divine Realm to be Eternal, everlasting? We must
come to some understanding of this perpetuity with which Eternity is
either identical or in conformity.
It must at once, be at once something in the nature of unity and yet a
notion compact of diversity, or a Kind, a Nature, that waits upon the
Existents of that Other World, either associated with them or known in
and upon them, they collectively being this Nature which, with all its
unity, is yet diverse in power and essence. Considering this
multifarious power, we declare it to be Essence in its relation to this
sphere which is substratum or underlie to it; where we see life we
think of it as Movement; where all is unvaried self-identity we call it
Repose; and we know it as, at once, Difference and Identity when we
recognize that all is unity with variety.
Then we reconstruct; we sum all into a collected unity once more, a
sole Life in the Supreme; we concentrate Diversity and all the endless
production of act: thus we know Identity, a concept or, rather, a Life
never varying, not becoming what previously it was not, the thing
immutably itself, broken by no interval; and knowing this, we know
Eternity.
We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding the
Universal content [time, space, and phenomena] in actual presence; not
this now and now that other, but always all; not existing now in one
mode and now in another, but a consummation without part or interval.
All its content is in immediate concentration as at one point; nothing
in it ever knows development: all remains identical within itself,
knowing nothing of change, for ever in a Now since nothing of it has
passed away or will come into being, but what it is now, that it is
ever.
Eternity, therefore -- while not the Substratum [not the essential
foundation of the Divine or Intellectual Principle] -- may be
considered as the radiation of this Substratum: it exists as the
announcement of the Identity in the Divine, of that state -- of being
thus and not otherwise -- which characterizes what has no futurity but
eternally is.
What future, in fact, could bring to that Being anything which it now
does not possess; and could it come to be anything which it is not once
for all?
There exists no source or ground from which anything could make its way
into that standing present; any imagined entrant will prove to be not
alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be anything at
present outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot include any past; what
can there be that once was in it and now is gone? Futurity, similarly,
is banned; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no ground is left
for its existence but that it be what it is.
That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being;
that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor
having ever changed -- that is Eternity. Thus we come to the
definition: the Life -- instantaneously entire, complete, at no point
broken into period or part -- which belongs to the Authentic Existent
by its very existence, this is the thing we were probing for -- this is
Eternity.
4. We must, however, avoid thinking of it as an accidental from outside
grafted upon that Nature: it is native to it, integral to it.
It is discerned as present essentially in that Nature like everything
else that we can predicate There -- all immanent, springing from that
Essence and inherent to that Essence. For whatsoever has primal Being
must be immanent to the Firsts and be a First-Eternity equally with The
Good that is among them and of them and equally with the truth that is
among them.
In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of the
All-Being; but in another aspect it is inherent in the All taken as a
totality, since that Authentic All is not a thing patched up out of
external parts, but is authentically an all because its parts are
engendered by itself. It is like the truthfulness in the Supreme which
is not an agreement with some outside fact or being but is inherent in
each member about which it is the truth. To an authentic All it is not
enough that it be everything that exists: it must possess allness in
the full sense that nothing whatever is absent from it. Then nothing is
in store for it: if anything were to come, that thing must have been
lacking to it, and it was, therefore, not All. And what, of a Nature
contrary to its own, could enter into it when it is [the Supreme and
therefore] immune? Since nothing can accrue to it, it cannot seek
change or be changed or ever have made its way into Being.
Engendered things are in continuous process of acquisition; eliminate
futurity, therefore, and at once they lose their being; if the
non-engendered are made amenable to futurity they are thrown down from
the seat of their existence, for, clearly, existence is not theirs by
their nature if it appears only as a being about to be, a becoming, an
advancing from stage to stage.
The essential existence of generated things seems to lie in their
existing from the time of their generation to the ultimate of time
after which they cease to be: but such an existence is compact of
futurity, and the annulment of that futurity means the stopping of the
life and therefore of the essential existence.
Such a stoppage would be true, also, of the [generated] All in so far
as it is a thing of process and change: for this reason it keeps
hastening towards its future, dreading to rest, seeking to draw Being
to itself by a perpetual variety of production and action and by its
circling in a sort of ambition after Essential Existence.
And here we have, incidentally, lighted upon the cause of the Circuit
of the All; it is a movement which seeks perpetuity by way of futurity.
The Primals, on the contrary, in their state of blessedness have no
such aspiration towards anything to come: they are the whole, now; what
life may be thought of as their due, they possess entire; they,
therefore, seek nothing, since there is nothing future to them, nothing
external to them in which any futurity could find lodgement.
Thus the perfect and all-comprehensive essence of the Authentic
Existent does not consist merely in the completeness inherent in its
members; its essence includes, further, its established immunity from
all lack with the exclusion, also, of all that is without Being -- for
not only must all things be contained in the All and Whole, but it can
contain nothing that is, or was ever, non-existent -- and this State
and Nature of the Authentic Existent is Eternity: in our very word,
Eternity means Ever-Being.
5. This Ever-Being is realized when upon examination of an object I am
able to say -- or rather, to know -- that in its very Nature it is
incapable of increment or change; anything that fails by that test is
no Ever-Existent or, at least, no Ever-All-Existent.
But is perpetuity enough in itself to constitute an Eternal?
No: the object must, farther, include such a Nature-Principle as to
give the assurance that the actual state excludes all future change, so
that it is found at every observation as it always was.
Imagine, then, the state of a being which cannot fall away from the
vision of this but is for ever caught to it, held by the spell of its
grandeur, kept to it by virtue of a nature itself unfailing -- or even
the state of one that must labour towards Eternity by directed effort,
but then to rest in it, immoveable at any point assimilated to it,
co-eternal with it, contemplating Eternity and the Eternal by what is
Eternal within the self.
Accepting this as a true account of an eternal, a perdurable Existent
-- one which never turns to any Kind outside itself, that possesses
life complete once for all, that has never received any accession, that
is now receiving none and will never receive any -- we have, with the
statement of a perduring Being, the statement also of perdurance and of
Eternity: perdurance is the corresponding state arising from the
[divine] substratum and inherent in it; Eternity [the Principle as
distinguished from the property of everlastingness] is that substratum
carrying that state in manifestation.
Eternity, thus, is of the order of the supremely great; it proves on
investigation to be identical with God: it may fitly be described as
God made manifest, as God declaring what He is, as existence without
jolt or change, and therefore as also the firmly living.
And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it; each of the
Beings of the Supreme is multiple by virtue of unlimited force; for to
be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is pre-eminently
the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its
own substance.
Thus a close enough definition of Eternity would be that it is a life
limitless in the full sense of being all the life there is and a life
which, knowing nothing of past or future to shatter its completeness,
possesses itself intact for ever. To the notion of a Life (a
Living-Principle) all-comprehensive add that it never spends itself,
and we have the statement of a Life instantaneously infinite.
6. Now the Principle this stated, all good and beauty, and everlasting,
is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed towards It, never
straying from It, but ever holding about It and in It and living by Its
law; and it is in this reference, as I judge, that Plato -- finely, and
by no means inadvertently but with profound intention -- wrote those
words of his, "Eternity stable in Unity"; he wishes to convey that
Eternity is not merely something circling on its traces into a final
unity but has [instantaneous] Being about The One as the unchanging
Life of the Authentic Existent. This is certainly what we have been
seeking: this Principle, at rest within rest with the One, is Eternity;
possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute
self-identical and none the less the active manifestation of an
unchanging Life set towards the Divine and dwelling within It, untrue,
therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side of Life -- this
will be Eternity [the Real-Being we have sought].
Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing variety
in the mode of existence: Being is, therefore, self-identical
throughout, and, therefore, again is one undistinguishable thing. Being
can have no this and that; it cannot be treated in terms of intervals,
unfoldings, progression, extension; there is no grasping any first or
last in it.
If, then, there is no first or last in this Principle, if existence is
its most authentic possession and its very self, and this in the sense
that its existence is Essence or Life -- then, once again, we meet here
what we have been discussing, Eternity.
Observe that such words as "always," "never," "sometimes" must be taken
as mere conveniences of exposition: thus "always -- used in the sense
not of time but of incorruptibility and endlessly complete scope --
might set up the false notion of stage and interval. We might perhaps
prefer to speak of "Being," without any attribute; but since this term
is applicable to Essence and some writers have used the word "Essence"
for things of process, we cannot convey our meaning to them without
introducing some word carrying the notion of perdurance.
There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting Being;
just as there is none between a philosopher and a true philosopher: the
attribute "true" came into use because there arose what masqueraded as
philosophy; and for similar reasons "everlasting" was adjoined to
"Being," and "Being" to "everlasting," and we have [the tautology of]
"Everlasting Being." We must take this "Everlasting" as expressing no
more than Authentic Being: it is merely a partial expression of a
potency which ignores all interval or term and can look forward to
nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The Principle
of which this is the statement will be the All-Existent, and, as being
all, can have no failing or deficiency, cannot be at some one point
complete and at some other lacking.
Things and Beings in the Time order -- even when to all appearance
complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a soul -- are still bound to
sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which
they need: let them have it, present to them and running side by side
with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete; completeness is
attributed to them only by an accident of language.
But the conception of Eternity demands something which is in its nature
complete without sequence; it is not satisfied by something measured
out to any remoter time or even by something limitless, but, in its
limitless reach, still having the progression of futurity: it requires
something immediately possessed of the due fullness of Being, something
whose Being does not depend upon any quantity [such as instalments of
time] but subsists before all quantity.
Itself having no quantity, it can have no contact with anything
quantitative since its Life cannot be made a thing of fragments, in
contradiction to the partlessness which is its character; it must be
without parts in the Life as in the essence.
The phrase "He was good" [used by Plato of the Demiurge] refers to the
Idea of the All; and its very indefiniteness signifies the utter
absense of relation to Time: so that even this Universe has had no
temporal beginning; and if we speak of something "before" it, that is
only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes its Eternal
Existence. Plato used the word merely for the convenience of
exposition, and immediately corrects it as inappropriate to the order
vested with the Eternity he conceives and affirms.
7. Now comes the question whether, in all this discussion, we are not
merely helping to make out a case for some other order of Beings and
talking of matters alien to ourselves.
But how could that be? What understanding can there be failing some
point of contact? And what contact could there be with the utterly
alien?
We must then have, ourselves, some part or share in Eternity.
Still, how is this possible to us who exist in Time?
The whole question turns on the distinction between being in Time and
being in Eternity, and this will be best realized by probing to the
Nature of Time. We must, therefore, descend from Eternity to the
investigation of Time, to the realm of Time: till now we have been
taking the upward way; we must now take the downward -- not to the
lowest levels but within the degree in which Time itself is a descent
from Eternity.
If the venerable sages of former days had not treated of Time, our
method would be to begin by linking to [the idea of] Eternity [the idea
of] its Next [its inevitable downward or outgoing subsequent in the
same order], then setting forth the probable nature of such a Next and
proceeding to show how the conception thus formed tallies with our own
doctrine.
But, as things are, our best beginning is to range over the most
noteworthy of the ancient opinions and see whether any of them accord
with ours.
Existing explanations of Time seem to fall into three classes:
Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a
moved object, and with some phenomenon of Movement: obviously it cannot
be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since, in its
characteristic idea, it is concerned with change.
Of those that explain it as Movement, some identify it with Absolute
Movement [or with the total of Movement], others with that of the All.
Those that make it a moved object would identify it with the orb of the
All. Those that conceive it as some phenomenon, or some period, of
Movement treat it, severally, either as a standard of measure or as
something inevitably accompanying Movement, abstract or definite.
8. Movement Time cannot be -- whether a definite act of moving is meant
or a united total made up of all such acts -- since movement, in either
sense, takes place in Time. And, of course, if there is any movement
not in Time, the identification with Time becomes all the less tenable.
In a word, Movement must be distinct from the medium in which it takes
place.
And, with all that has been said or is still said, one consideration is
decisive: Movement can come to rest, can be intermittent; Time is
continuous.
We will be told that the Movement of the All is continuous [and so may
be identical with Time].
But, if the reference is to the Circuit of the heavenly system [it is
not strictly continuous, or equable, since] the time taken in the
return path is not that of the outgoing movement; the one is twice as
long as the other: this Movement of the All proceeds, therefore, by two
different degrees; the rate of the entire journey is not that of the
first half.
Further, the fact that we hear of the Movement of the outermost sphere
being the swiftest confirms our theory. Obviously, it is the swiftest
of movements by taking the lesser time to traverse the greater space
the very greatest -- all other moving things are slower by taking a
longer time to traverse a mere segment of the same extension: in other
words, Time is not this movement.
And, if Time is not even the movement of the Kosmic Sphere much less is
it the sphere itself though that has been identified with Time on the
ground of its being in motion.
Is it, then, some phenomenon or connection of Movement?
Let us, tentatively, suppose it to be extent, or duration, of Movement.
Now, to begin with, Movement, even continuous, has no unchanging extent
[as Time the equable has], since, even in space, it may be faster or
slower; there must, therefore, be some unit of standard outside it, by
which these differences are measurable, and this outside standard would
more properly be called Time. And failing such a measure, which extent
would be Time, that of the fast or of the slow -- or rather which of
them all, since these speed-differences are limitless?
Is it the extent of the subordinate Movement [= movement of things of
earth]?
Again, this gives us no unit since the movement is infinitely variable;
we would have, thus, not Time but Times.
The extent of the Movement of the All, then?
The Celestial Circuit may, no doubt, be thought of in terms of
quantity. It answers to measure -- in two ways. First there is space;
the movement is commensurate with the area it passes through, and this
area is its extent. But this gives us, still, space only, not Time.
Secondly, the circuit, considered apart from distance traversed, has
the extent of its continuity, of its tendency not to stop but to
proceed indefinitely: but this is merely amplitude of Movement; search
it, tell its vastness, and, still, Time has no more appeared, no more
enters into the matter, than when one certifies a high pitch of heat;
all we have discovered is Motion in ceaseless succession, like water
flowing ceaselessly, motion and extent of motion.
Succession or repetition gives us Number -- dyad, triad, etc. -- and
the extent traversed is a matter of Magnitude; thus we have Quantity of
Movement -- in the form of number, dyad, triad, decade, or in the form
of extent apprehended in what we may call the amount of the Movement:
but, the idea of Time we have not. That definite Quantity is merely
something occurring within Time, for, otherwise Time is not everywhere
but is something belonging to Movement which thus would be its
substratum or basic-stuff: once more, then, we would be making Time
identical with Movement; for the extent of Movement is not something
outside it but is simply its continuousness, and we need not halt upon
the difference between the momentary and the continuous, which is
simply one of manner and degree. The extended movement and its extent
are not Time; they are in Time. Those that explain Time as extent of
Movement must mean not the extent of the movement itself but something
which determines its extension, something with which the movement keeps
pace in its course. But what this something is, we are not told; yet it
is, clearly, Time, that in which all Movement proceeds. This is what
our discussion has aimed at from the first: "What, essentially, is
Time?" It comes to this: we ask "What is Time?" and we are answered,
"Time is the extension of Movement in Time!"
On the one hand Time is said to be an extension apart from and outside
that of Movement; and we are left to guess what this extension may be:
on the other hand, it is represented as the extension of Movement; and
this leaves the difficulty what to make of the extension of Rest --
though one thing may continue as long in repose as another in motion,
so that we are obliged to think of one thing Time that covers both Rest
and Movements, and, therefore, stands distinct from either.
What then is this thing of extension? To what order of beings does it
belong?
It obviously is not spatial, for place, too, is something outside it.
9. "A Number, a Measure, belonging to Movement?"
This, at least, is plausible since Movement is a continuous thin; but
let us consider.
To begin with, we have the doubt which met us when we probed its
identification with extent of Movement: is Time the measure of any and
every Movement?
Have we any means of calculating disconnected and lawless Movement?
What number or measure would apply? What would be the principle of such
a Measure?
One Measure for movement slow and fast, for any and every movement:
then that number and measure would be like the decade, by which we
reckon horses and cows, or like some common standard for liquids and
solids. If Time is this Kind of Measure, we learn, no doubt, of what
objects it is a Measure -- of Movements -- but we are no nearer
understanding what it is in itself.
Or: we may take the decade and think of it, apart from the horses or
cows, as a pure number; this gives us a measure which, even though not
actually applied, has a definite nature. Is Time, perhaps, a Measure in
this sense?
No: to tell us no more of Time in itself than that it is such a number
is merely to bring us back to the decade we have already rejected, or
to some similar collective figure.
If, on the other hand, Time is [not such an abstraction but] a Measure
possessing a continuous extent of its own, it must have quantity, like
a foot-rule; it must have magnitude: it will, clearly, be in the nature
of a line traversing the path of Movement. But, itself thus sharing in
the movement, how can it be a Measure of Movement? Why should the one
of the two be the measure rather than the other? Besides an
accompanying measure is more plausibly considered as a measure of the
particular movement it accompanies than of Movement in general.
Further, this entire discussion assumes continuous movement, since the
accompanying principle; Time, is itself unbroken [but a full
explanation implies justification of Time in repose].
The fact is that we are not to think of a measure outside and apart,
but of a combined thing, a measured Movement, and we are to discover
what measures it.
Given a Movement measured, are we to suppose the measure to be a
magnitude?
If so, which of these two would be Time, the measured movement or the
measuring magnitude? For Time [as measure] must be either the movement
measured by magnitude, or the measuring magnitude itself or something
using the magnitude like a yard-stick to appraise the movement. In all
three cases, as we have indicated, the application is scarcely
plausible except where continuous movement is assumed: unless the
Movement proceeds smoothly, and even unintermittently and as embracing
the entire content of the moving object, great difficulties arise in
the identification of Time with any kind of measure.
Let us, then, suppose Time to be this "measured Movement," measured by
quantity. Now the Movement if it is to be measured requires a measure
outside itself; this was the only reason for raising the question of
the accompanying measure. In exactly the same way the measuring
magnitude, in turn, will require a measure, because only when the
standard shows such and such an extension can the degree of movement be
appraised. Time then will be, not the magnitude accompanying the
Movement, but that numerical value by which the magnitude accompanying
the Movement is estimated. But that number can be only the abstract
figure which represents the magnitude, and it is difficult to see how
an abstract figure can perform the act of measuring.
And, supposing that we discover a way in which it can, we still have
not Time, the measure, but a particular quantity of Time, not at all
the same thing: Time means something very different from any definite
period: before all question as to quantity is the question as to the
thing of which a certain quantity is present.
Time, we are told, is the number outside Movement and measuring it,
like the tens applied to the reckoning of the horses and cows but not
inherent in them: we are not told what this Number is; yet, applied or
not, it must, like that decade, have some nature of its own.
Or "it is that which accompanies a Movement and measures it by its
successive stages"; but we are still left asking what this thing
recording the stages may be.
In any case, once a thing -- whether by point or standard or any other
means -- measures succession, it must measure according to time: this
number appraising movement degree by degree must, therefore, if it is
to serve as a measure at all, be something dependent upon time and in
contact with it: for, either, degree is spatial, merely -- the
beginning and end of the Stadium, for example -- or in the only
alternative, it is a pure matter of Time: the succession of early and
late is stage of Time, Time ending upon a certain Now or Time beginning
from a Now.
Time, therefore, is something other than the mere number measuring
Movement, whether Movement in general or any particular tract of
Movement.
Further: Why should the mere presence of a number give us Time -- a
number measuring or measured; for the same number may be either -- if
Time is not given us by the fact of Movement itself, the Movement which
inevitably contains in itself a succession of stages? To make the
number essential to Time is like saying that magnitude has not its full
quantity unless we can estimate that quantity.
Again, if Time is, admittedly, endless, how can number apply to it?
Are we to take some portion of Time and find its numerical statement?
That simply means that Time existed before number was applied to it.
We may, therefore, very well think that it existed before the Soul or
Mind that estimates it -- if, indeed, it is not to be thought to take
its origin from the Soul -- for no measurement by anything is necessary
to its existence; measured or not, it has the full extent of its being.
And suppose it to be true that the Soul is the appraiser, using
Magnitude as the measuring standard, how does this help us to the
conception of Time?
10. Time, again, has been described as some sort of a sequence upon
Movement, but we learn nothing from this, nothing is said, until we
know what it is that produces this sequential thing: probably the cause
and not the result would turn out to be Time.
And, admitting such a thing, there would still remain the question
whether it came into being before the movement, with it, or after it;
and, whether we say before or with or after, we are speaking of order
in Time: and thus our definition is "Time is a sequence upon movement
in Time!"
Enough: Our main purpose is to show what Time is, not to refute false
definition. To traverse point by point the many opinions of our many
predecessors would mean a history rather than an identification; we
have treated the various theories as fully as is possible in a cursory
review: and, notice, that which makes Time the Measure of the
All-Movement is refuted by our entire discussion and, especially, by
the observations upon the Measurement of Movement in general, for all
the argument -- except, of course, that from irregularity -- applies to
the All as much as to particular Movement.
We are, thus, at the stage where we are to state what Time really is.
11. To this end we must go back to the state we affirmed of Eternity,
unwavering Life, undivided totality, limitless, knowing no divagation,
at rest in unity and intent upon it. Time was not yet: or at least it
did not exist for the Eternal Beings, though its being was implicit in
the Idea and Principle of progressive derivation.
But from the Divine Beings thus at rest within themselves, how did this
Time first emerge?
We can scarcely call upon the Muses to recount its origin since they
were not in existence then -- perhaps not even if they had been. The
engendered thing, Time, itself, can best tell us how it rose and became
manifest; something thus its story would run:
Time at first -- in reality before that "first" was produced by desire
of succession -- Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest within the
Authentic Existent: it was not yet Time; it was merged in the Authentic
and motionless with it. But there was an active principle there, one
set on governing itself and realizing itself [= the All-Soul], and it
chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its
rest, and Time stirred with it. And we, stirring to a ceaseless
succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the
establishment of ever-new difference, traversed a portion of the
outgoing path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time.
For the Soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of
translating elsewhere what it saw in the Authentic Realm, and it could
not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its
possession.
A Seed is at rest; the nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards,
makes way towards what seems to it a large life; but by that partition
it loses; it was a unity self-gathered, and now, in going forth from
itself, it fritters its unity away; it advances into a weaker
greatness. It is so with this faculty of the Soul, when it produces the
Kosmos known to sense -- the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in
the very movement of the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to
reproduce that of the Divine. To bring this Kosmos into being, the Soul
first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time; this world
of its fashioning it then gave over to be a servant to Time, making it
at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the
bournes of Time. For the Kosmos moves only in Soul -- the only Space
within the range of the All open to it to move in -- and therefore its
Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in Soul.
Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of
novelty, the Soul produces succession as well as act; taking up new
purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not
existed in that former period when its purpose was still dormant and
its life was not as it since became: the life is changed and that
change carries with it a change of Time. Time, then, is contained in
differentiation of Life; the ceaseless forward movement of Life brings
with it unending Time; and Life as it achieves its stages constitutes
past Time.
Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the Soul in
movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another?
Yes; for Eternity, we have said, is Life in repose, unchanging,
self-identical, always endlessly complete; and there is to be an image
of Eternity-Time -- such an image as this lower All presents of the
Higher Sphere. Therefore over against that higher life there must be
another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the
Soul; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be
the movement of some partial phase; over against that identity,
unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant
in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts; over against that
oneness without extent or interval there must be an image of oneness, a
unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and
all-comprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to
a perpetual futurity; over against the Whole in concentration, there
must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. The lesser
must always be working towards the increase of its Being, this will be
its imitation of what is immediately complete, self-realized, endless
without stage: only thus can its Being reproduce that of the Higher.
Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of Soul; Eternity is
not outside of the Authentic Existent: nor is it to be taken as a
sequence or succession to Soul, any more than Eternity is to the
Divine. It is a thing seen upon Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as
Eternity to the Intellectual Realm.
12. We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle --
Time -- a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the
Soul, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes
following silently upon each other -- a Principle, then, whose Act is
sequent.
But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and withdraw
from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and
unending activity of an ever-existent soul not self-contained or
self-intent but concerned about doing and engendering: imagine it no
longer accomplishing any Act, setting a pause to this work it has
inaugurated; let this outgoing phase of the Soul become once more,
equally with the rest, turned to the Supreme, to Eternal Being, to the
tranquilly stable.
What would then exist but Eternity?
All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things?
What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or
short-lasting? What ground would lie ready to the Soul's operation but
the Supreme in which it has its Being? Or, indeed, what operative
tendency could it have even to That since a prior separation is the
necessary condition of tendency?
The very sphere of the Universe would not exist; for it cannot antedate
Time: it, too, has its Being and its Movement in Time; and if it ceased
to move, the Soul-Act [which is the essence of Time] continuing, we
could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it.
If, then, the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal
unity, Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be
traced to the first stir of the Soul's tendency towards the production
of the sensible universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how
"Time" -- as we read -- "came into Being simultaneously" with this All:
the Soul begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the
Soul this Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the
Universe is a content of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read
also of the orbit of the Stars being Times": but do not forget what
follows; "the stars exist," we are told, "for the display and
delimitation of Time," and "that there may be a manifest Measure." No
indication of Time could be derived from [observation of] the Soul; no
portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in
itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting;
therefore the Soul brings into being night and day; in their difference
is given Duality -- from which, we read, arises the concept of Number.
We observe the tract between a sunrise and its return and, as the
movement is uniform, we thus obtain a Time-interval upon which to
measure ourselves, and we use this as a standard. We have thus a
measure of Time. Time itself is not a measure. How would it set to
work? And what kind of thing is there of which it could say, "I find
the extent of this equal to such and such a stretch of my own extent?"
What is this "I"? Obviously something by which measurement is known.
Time, then, serves towards measurement but is not itself the Measure:
the Movement of the All will be measured according to Time, but Time
will not, of its own Nature, be a Measure of Movement: primarily a Kind
to itself, it will incidentally exhibit the magnitudes of that
movement.
And the reiterated observation of Movement -- the same extent found to
be traversed in such and such a period -- will lead to the conception
of a definite quantity of Time past.
This brings us to the fact that, in a certain sense, the Movement, the
orbit of the universe, may legitimately be said to measure Time -- in
so far as that is possible at all -- since any definite stretch of that
circuit occupies a certain quantity of Time, and this is the only grasp
we have of Time, our only understanding of it: what that circuit
measures -- by indication, that is -- will be Time, manifested by the
Movement but not brought into being by it.
This means that the measure of the Spheric Movement has itself been
measured by a definite stretch of that Movement and therefore is
something different; as measure, it is one thing and, as the measured,
it is another; [its being measure or] its being measured cannot be of
its essence.
We are no nearer knowledge than if we said that the foot-rule measures
Magnitude while we left the concept Magnitude undefined; or, again, we
might as well define Movement -- whose limitlessness puts it out of our
reach -- as the thing measured by Space; the definition would be
parallel since we can mark off a certain space which the Movement has
traversed and say the one is equivalent to the other.
13. The Spheral Circuit, then, performed in Time, indicates it: but
when we come to Time itself there is no question of its being "within"
something else: it must be primary, a thing "within itself." It is that
in which all the rest happens, in which all movement and rest exist
smoothly and under order; something following a definite order is
necessary to exhibit it and to make it a subject of knowledge -- though
not to produce it -- it is known by order whether in rest or in motion;
in motion especially, for Movement better moves Time into our ken than
rest can, and it is easier to estimate distance traversed than repose
maintained.
This last fact has led to Time being called a measure of Movement when
it should have been described as something measured by Movement and
then defined in its essential nature; it is an error to define it by a
mere accidental concomitant and so to reverse the actual order of
things. Possibly, however, this reversal was not intended by the
authors of the explanation: but, at any rate, we do not understand
them; they plainly apply the term Measure to what is in reality the
measured and leave us unable to grasp their meaning: our perplexity may
be due to the fact that their writings -- addressed to disciples
acquainted with their teaching -- do not explain what this thing,
measure, or measured object, is in itself.
Plato does not make the essence of Time consist in its being either a
measure or a thing measured by something else.
Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the
Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal
segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to
estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to: but when his purpose
is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it sprang into
Being simultaneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of
Eternity, its image in motion, Time necessarily unresting as the Life
with which it must keep pace: and "coeval with the Heavens" because it
is this same Life [of the Divine Soul] which brings the Heavens also
into being; Time and the Heavens are the work of the one Life.
Suppose that Life, then, to revert -- an impossibility -- to perfect
unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the Heavens, no
longer maintained by that Life, would end at once.
It is the height of absurdity to fasten on the succession of earlier
and later occurring in the life and movement of this sphere of ours, to
declare that it must be some definite thing and to call it Time, while
denying the reality of the more truly existent Movement, that of the
Soul, which has also its earlier and later: it cannot be reasonable to
recognize succession in the case of the Soulless Movement -- and so to
associate Time with that -- while ignoring succession and the reality
of Time in the Movement from which the other takes its imitative
existence; to ignore, that is, the very Movement in which succession
first appears, a self-actuated movement which, engendering its own
every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all
which, it is the cause of existence, at once, and of every consequent.
But: -- we treat the Kosmic Movement as overarched by that of the Soul
and bring it under Time; yet we do not set under Time that
Soul-Movement itself with all its endless progression: what is our
explanation of this paradox?
Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior Eternity which knows
neither its progression nor its extension. The descent towards Time
begins with this Soul-Movement; it made Time and harbours Time as a
concomitant to its Act.
And this is how Time is omnipresent: that Soul is absent from no
fragment of the Kosmos just as our Soul is absent from no particle of
ourselves. As for those who pronounce Time a thing of no substantial
existence, of no reality, they clearly belie God Himself whenever they
say "He was" or "He will be": for the existence indicated by the "was
and will be" can have only such reality as belongs to that in which it
is said to be situated: -- but this school demands another type of
argument.
Meanwhile we have a supplementary observation to make.
Take a man walking and observe the advance he has made; that advance
gives you the quantity of movement he is employing: and when you know
that quantity -- represented by the ground traversed by his feet, for,
of course, we are supposing the bodily movement to correspond with the
pace he has set within himself -- you know also the movement that
exists in the man himself before the feet move.
You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of
Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the
Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension,
within the man's soul.
But the Movement within the Soul -- to what are you to (relate) refer
that?
Let your choice fall where it may, from this point there is nothing but
the unextended: and this is the primarily existent, the container to
all else, having itself no container, brooking none.
And, as with Man's Soul, so with the Soul of the All.
"Is Time, then, within ourselves as well?"
Time in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form
in all; for all the Souls are the one Soul.
And this is why Time can never be broken apart, any more than Eternity
which, similarly, under diverse manifestations, has its Being as an
integral constituent of all the eternal Existences.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE.
1. Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious
concern and maintained that all things are striving after
Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end -- and this, not
merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the
Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces
these -- and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to
their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in
its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in
mimicry and in image -- we would scarcely find anyone to endure so
strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is
no risk in a light handling of our own ideas.
Well -- in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of
Contemplation?
Yes; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation: our play aims
at Vision; and there is every reason to believe that child or man, in
sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every
act is an effort towards Vision; the compulsory act, which tends rather
to bring the Vision down to outward things, and the act thought of as
voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort
towards Vision.
The case of Man will be treated later on; let us speak, first, of the
earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what
is the nature of Contemplation in them, how we relate to any
Contemplative activity the labour and productiveness of the earth, how
Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of conscious
representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of
the Contemplation which it does not possess.
2. There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any
implement borrowed or inherent: Nature needs simply the Matter which it
is to work upon and bring under Form; its productivity cannot depend
upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all
that variety of colour and pattern?
The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the
creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours; all they can do to
impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere. None the
less there is a parallel which demands attention: in the case of
workers in such arts there must be something locked within themselves,
an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all
their creation; and this observation should have indicated a similar
phenomenon in Nature; it should be clear that this indwelling efficacy,
which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the
craftsman -- but, there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need
possess no outgoing force as against that remaining within; the only
moved thing is Matter; there can be no moved phase in this
Nature-Principle; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover;
this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity; it is the unmoved
Principle operating in the Kosmos.
We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt, unmoved, but
that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by motion.
But, if Nature entire is in question here, it is identical with the
Reason-Principle; and any part of it that is unmoved is the
Reason-Principle. The Nature-Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a
compound of Form and Matter; there is no need for it to possess Matter,
hot and cold: the Matter that underlies it, on which it exercises its
creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without quality,
becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when brought under Reason:
Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a
Reason-Principle.
This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the
Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a Reason-Principle
producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring, which, in turn,
while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the
underlie, Matter.
The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very ultimate
of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further: that which
produces in the created realm is the living Reason-Principle -- brother
no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having life-giving power.
3. But if this Reason-Principle [Nature] is in act -- and produces by
the process indicated -- how can it have any part in Contemplation?
To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact,
a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a
Contemplative act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will
therefore be distinct from that Idea: the Reason-Principle then, as
accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not
being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation.
Taking the Reason-Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest
and last springs from a mental act [in the higher Logos] and is itself
a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated, but
above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases,
first, that identified not as Nature but as All-Soul and, next, that
operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle.
And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contemplation?
Wholly and solely?
From self-contemplation, then? Or what are we to think? It derives from
a Contemplation and some contemplating Being; how are we to suppose it
to have Contemplation itself?
The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty -- that, I mean,
of planning its own content, it does not possess.
But why not, since it is a phase of Life, a Reason-Principle and a
creative Power?
Because to plan for a thing is to lack it: Nature does not lack; it
creates because it possesses. Its creative act is simply its possession
of it own characteristic Essence; now its Essence, since it is a
Reason-Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an
object of contemplation. In other words, the, Nature-Principle produces
by virtue of being an act of contemplation, an object of contemplation
and a Reason-Principle; on this triple character depends its creative
efficacy.
Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of
contemplation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which
never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but
creates by simply being a contemplation.
4. And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it
cared to listen and to speak:
"It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in
silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And
what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever comes into being is my is my
vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character
who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create vision by the
vision-seeing faculty within me. The mathematicians from their vision
draw their figures: but I draw nothing: I gaze and the figures of the
material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation. As
with my Mother (the All-Soul] and the Beings that begot me so it is
with me: they are born of a Contemplation and my birth is from them,
not by their Act but by their Being; they are the loftier
Reason-Principles, they contemplate themselves and I am born."
Now what does this tell us?
It tells: that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet
earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it possesses, therefore, in
its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor
even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence; that, in
this immutability accompanied by what may be called Self-Consciousness,
it possesses -- within the measure of its possibility -- a knowledge of
the realm of subsequent things perceived in virtue of that
understanding and consciousness; and, achieving thus a resplendent and
delicious spectacle, has no further aim.
Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of "understanding" or
"perception" in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense
applicable to other beings; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed
from the wake.
For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a self-intuition, a
spectacle laid before it by virtue of its unaccompanied
self-concentration and by the fact that in itself it belongs to the
order of intuition. It is a Vision silent but somewhat blurred, for
there exists another a clearer of which Nature is the image: hence all
that Nature produces is weak; the weaker act of intuition produces the
weaker object.
In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation,
find in action their trace of vision and of reason: their spiritual
feebleness unfits them for contemplation; they are left with a void,
because they cannot adequately seize the vision; yet they long for it;
they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they
cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their
action, and of making it visible and sensible to others when the result
shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making
will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of
vision-attenuation if the doer was aiming only at the thing done;
complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the
mere work produced.
Given the power to contemplate the Authentic, who would run, of choice,
after its image?
The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way duller
children, inapt to study and speculation, take to crafts and manual
labour.
5. This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a
Contemplation: we may now take the matter up to the higher Soul; we
find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards
knowing and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it
attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it -- in itself, all one
object of Vision -- to produce another Vision [that of the Kosmos]: it
is just as a given science, complete in itself, becomes the source and
cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who
attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible
objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later
creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul.
The primal phase of the Soul -- inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its
participation in the Supreme, filled and illuminated -- remains
unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of
the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the
Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming
from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no
extremity at which it dwindles out. But, travel as far as it may, it
never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the
outgoing began: if it did, it would no longer be everywhere [its
continuous Being would be broken and] it would be present at the end,
only, of its course.
None the less that which goes forth cannot be equal to that which
remains.
In sum, then:
The Soul is to extend throughout the Universe, no spot void of its
energy: but, a prior is always different from its secondary, and energy
is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act; act,
however, is not at this stage existent since it depends upon
contemplation: therefore the Soul, while its phases differ, must, in
all of them, remain a contemplation and what seems to be an act done
under contemplation must be in reality that weakened contemplation of
which we have spoken: the engendered must respect the Kind, but in
weaker form, dwindled in the descent.
All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act
upon external things: it is a Soul in vision and, by this vision,
creating its own subsequent -- this Principle [of Nature], itself also
contemplative but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and
cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its prior -- a Vision
creates the Vision.
[Such creative contemplation is not inexplicable] for no limit exists
either to contemplation or to its possible objects, and this explains
how the Soul is universal: where can this thing fail to be, which is
one identical thing in every Soul; Vision is not cabined within the
bournes of magnitude.
This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same
strength in each and every place and thing -- any more than that it is
at the same strength in each of its own phases.
The Charioteer [the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus
Myth] gives the two horses [its two dissonant faculties] what he has
seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what
made that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their
desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for -- and
that was vision, and an object of vision.
6. Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of
contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as
their object; what they have not been able to achieve by the direct
path, they hope to come at by the circuit.
Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to come
about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it
present before the mind: their success is the laying up of a vision. We
act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain
outside ourselves, not in order that we possess nothing but that we may
hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind?
Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for [mind or]
Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul
can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more
certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper.
This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied
and seeks nothing further; the contemplation, in one so conditioned,
remains absorbed within as having acquired certainty to rest upon. The
brighter the certainty, the more tranquil is the contemplation as
having acquired the more perfect unity; and -- for now we come to the
serious treatment of the subject --
In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it
comes to identification with the object of its knowledge.
As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to
each other; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to
one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or Soul
remain idle.
Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one
identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds it really
his own.
The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with
it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary
nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming,
as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely
intellectual, it sees [in its outgoing act] as a stranger looking upon
a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even
an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a [lower] realm
which these do not see.
For, it is a not a complete thing: it has a lack; it is incomplete in
regard to its Prior; yet it, also, has a tranquil vision of what it
produces. What it has once brought into being it produces no more, for
all its productiveness is determined by this lack: it produces for the
purpose of Contemplation, in the desire of knowing all its content:
when there is question of practical things it adapts its content to the
outside order.
The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more
tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contemplative.
It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the
object of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by
observation. It leaves its native realm and busies itself elsewhere;
then it returns, and it possesses its vision by means of that phase of
itself from which it had parted. The self-indwelling Soul inclines less
to such experiences.
The Sage, then, is the man made over into a Reason-Principle: to others
he shows his act but in himself he is Vision: such a man is already
set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself,
towards what is one and at rest: all his faculty and life are
inward-bent.
7. Certain Principles, then, we may take to be established -- some
self-evident, others brought out by our treatment above:
All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a
vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in
their vision is an object of vision-manifest to sensation or to true
knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all
impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to
produce Ideal-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that
universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all
produce objects of vision, Ideal-forms. In the engendering of these
sub-existences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that
the creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but
in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the
ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further
downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards
knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent
principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It
is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things
must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is,
universally, the goal.
When living things reproduce their Kind, it is that the
Reason-Principles within stir them; the procreative act is the
expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many
forms, many objects of contemplation, so that the universe may be
filled full with Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as
nearly as possible, endless: to bring anything into being is to produce
an Idea-Form and that again is to enrich the universe with
contemplation: all the failures, alike in being and in doing, are but
the swerving of visionaries from the object of vision: in the end the
sorriest craftsman is still a maker of forms, ungracefully. So Love,
too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form.
8. From this basis we proceed:
In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to
that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle
itself -- the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more
intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one
thing with them; and in the advanced Soul the objects of knowledge,
well on the way towards the Intellectual-Principle, are close to
identity with their container.
Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there
is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of
domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence,
by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and
Knowing; we cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there
must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity.
The Supreme must be an entity in which the two are one; it will,
therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an object of vision like things
existing in something other than themselves: what exists in an outside
element is some mode of living-thing; it is not the Self-Living.
Now admitting the existence of a living thing that is at once a Thought
and its object, it must be a Life distinct from the vegetative or
sensitive life or any other life determined by Soul.
In a certain sense no doubt all lives are thoughts -- but qualified as
thought vegetative, thought sensitive and thought psychic.
What, then, makes them thoughts?
The fact that they are Reason-Principles. Every life is some form of
thought, but of a dwindling clearness like the degrees of life itself.
The first and clearest Life and the first Intelligence are one Being.
The First Life, then, is an Intellection and the next form of Life is
the next Intellection and the last form of Life is the last form of
Intellection. Thus every Life, of the order strictly so called, is an
Intellection.
But while men may recognize grades in life they reject grade in
thought; to them there are thoughts [full and perfect] and anything
else is no thought.
This is simply because they do not seek to establish what Life is.
The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that
whatever exists is a bye-work of visioning: if, then, the truest Life
is such by virtue of an Intellection and is identical with the truest
Intellection, then the truest Intellection is a living being;
Contemplation and its object constitute a living thing, a Life, two
inextricably one.
The duality, thus, is a unity; but how is this unity also a plurality?
The explanation is that in a unity there can be no seeing [a pure unity
has no room for vision and an object]; and in its Contemplation the One
is not acting as a Unity; if it were, the Intellectual-Principle cannot
exist. The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began; all
unknown to itself, it became manifold; it grew, as it were, pregnant:
desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were
better had it never known the desire by which a Secondary came into
being: it is like a Circle [in the Idea] which in projection becomes a
figure, a surface, a circumference, a centre, a system of radii, of
upper and lower segments. The Whence is the better; the Whither is less
good: the Whence is not the same as the Whence-followed-by-a-Whither;
the Whence all alone is greater than with the Whither added to it.
The Intellectual-Principle on the other hand was never merely the
Principle of an inviolable unity; it was a universal as well and, being
so, was the Intellectual-Principle of all things. Being, thus, all
things and the Principle of all, it must essentially include this part
of itself [this element-of-plurality] which is universal and is all
things: otherwise, it contains a part which is not
Intellectual-Principle: it will be a juxtaposition of
non-Intellectuals, a huddled heap waiting to be made over from the mass
of things into the Intellectual-Principle!
We conclude that this Being is limitless and that, in all the outflow
from it, there is no lessening either in its emanation, since this also
is the entire universe, nor in itself, the starting point, since it is
no assemblage of parts [to be diminished by any outgo].
9. Clearly a Being of this nature is not the primal existent; there
must exist that which transcends it, that Being [the Absolute], to
which all our discussion has been leading.
In the first place, Plurality is later than Unity. The
Intellectual-Principle is a number [= the expression of a plurality];
and number derives from unity: the source of a number such as this must
be the authentically One. Further, it is the sum of an
Intellectual-Being with the object of its Intellection, so that it is a
duality; and, given this duality, we must find what exists before it.
What is this?
The Intellectual-Principle taken separately, perhaps?
No: an Intellect is always inseparable from an intelligible object;
eliminate the intelligible, and the Intellectual-Principle disappears
with it. If, then, what we are seeking cannot be the
Intellectual-Principle but must be something that rejects the duality
there present, then the Prior demanded by that duality must be
something on the further side of the Intellectual-Principle.
But might it not be the Intelligible object itself?
No: for the Intelligible makes an equally inseparable duality with the
Intellectual-Principle.
If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible
Object can be the First Existent, what is?
Our answer can only be:
The source of both.
What will This be; under what character can we picture It?
It must be either Intellective or without Intellection: if Intellective
it is the Intellectual-Principle; if not, it will be without even
knowledge of itself -- so that, either way, what is there so august
about it?
If we define it as The Good and the wholly simplex, we will, no doubt,
be telling the truth, but we will not be giving any certain and lucid
account of it as long as we have in mind no entity in which to lodge
the conception by which we define it.
Yet: our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our intelligence;
our power is that of knowing the intelligible by means of the
intelligence: but this Entity transcends all of the intellectual
nature; by what direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our
grasp?
To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the degree
of human faculty: we indicate it by virtue of what in ourselves is like
it.
For in us, also, there is something of that Being; nay, nothing, ripe
for that participation, can be void of it.
Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this omnipresent
Being that in you which is capable of drawing from It, and you have
your share in it: imagine a voice sounding over a vast waste of land,
and not only over the emptiness alone but over human beings; wherever
you be in that great space you have but to listen and you take the
voice entire -- entire though yet with a difference.
And what do we take when we thus point the Intelligence?
The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins: essentially
a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over to those powers
within it which tend upward; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it
must become something more than Intellect.
For the Intellectual-Principle is the earliest form of Life: it is the
Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal Order -- the
outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous
process.
In its character as Life, as emanation, as containing all things in
their precise forms and not merely in the agglomerate mass -- for this
would be to contain them imperfectly and inarticulately -- it must of
necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate
but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect and of the
Universe.
For the Universe is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a
source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the
All, since it is to generate the All, and must be not a plurality but
the Source of plurality, since universally a begetting power is less
complex than the begotten. Thus the Being that has engendered the
Intellectual-Principle must be more simplex than the
Intellectual-Principle.
We may be told that this engendering Principle is the One-and-All.
But, at that, it must be either each separate entity from among all or
it will be all things in the one mass.
Now if it were the massed total of all, it must be of later origin than
any of the things of which it is the sum; if it precedes the total, it
differs from the things that make up the total and they from it: if it
and the total of things constitute a co-existence, it is not a Source.
But what we are probing for must be a Source; it must exist before all,
that all may be fashioned as sequel to it.
As for the notion that it may be each separate entity of the All, this
would make a self-Identity into a what you like, where you like,
indifferently, and would, besides, abolish all distinction in things
themselves.
Once more we see that this can be no thing among things but must be
prior to all things.
10. And what will such a Principle essentially be?
The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence
would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the
Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life.
This Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life -- for
that Manifestation of Life which is the Universe of things is not the
First Activity; it is itself poured forth, so to speak, like water from
a spring.
Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself; it gives itself to
all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by what they take, but remains
always integrally as it was; the tides that proceed from it are at one
within it before they run their several ways, yet all, in some sense,
know beforehand down what channels they will pour their streams.
Or: think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree while yet it
is the stationary Principle of the whole, in no sense scattered over
all that extent but, as it were, vested in the root: it is the giver of
the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved itself,
not manifold but the Principle of that manifold life.
And this surprises no one: though it is in fact astonishing how all
that varied vitality springs from the unvarying, and how that very
manifoldness could not be unless before the multiplicity there were
something all singleness; for, the Principle is not broken into parts
to make the total; on the contrary, such partition would destroy both;
nothing would come into being if its cause, thus broken up, changed
character. Thus we are always brought back to The One.
Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced;
the All has its One, its Prior but not yet the Absolute One; through
this we reach that Absolute One, where all such reference comes to an
end.
Now when we reach a One -- the stationary Principle -- in the tree, in
the animal, in Soul, in the All -- we have in every case the most
powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the
Authentically Existent Beings -- their Principle and source and
potentiality -- shall we lose confidence and suspect it of
being-nothing?
Certainly this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source
-- its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it -- not existence,
not essence, not life -- since it is That which transcends all these.
But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you
hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its
content, seek to grasp it more and more -- understanding it by that
intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that
follow upon it and exist by its power.
Another approach:
The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees;
therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective.
This implies the distinction of Matter and Form in it -- as there must
be in all actual seeing -- the Matter in this case being the
Intelligibles which the Intellectual-Principle contains and sees. All
actual seeing implies duality; before the seeing takes place there is
the pure unity [of the power of seeing]. That unity [of principle]
acquires duality [in the act of seeing], and the duality is [always to
be traced back to] a unity.
Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and
realization, so the vision in the Intellectual-Principle demands, for
its completion, The Good.
It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or
to perform any other Act; for The Good is the centre of all else, and
it is by means of The Good that every thing has Act, while the Good is
in need of nothing and therefore possesses nothing beyond itself.
Once you have uttered "The Good," add no further thought: by any
addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a
deficiency.
Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it; it
would become a duality, Intellect and the Good. The Good has no need of
the Intellectual-Principle which, on the contrary, needs it, and,
attaining it, is shaped into Goodness and becomes perfect by it: the
Form thus received, sprung from the Good, brings it to likeness with
the Good.
Thus the traces of the Good discerned upon it must be taken as
indication of the nature of that Archetype: we form a conception of its
Authentic Being from its image playing upon the Intellectual-Principle.
This image of itself, it has communicated to the Intellect that
contemplates it: thus all the striving is on the side of the Intellect,
which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer. The Being
beyond neither strives, since it feels no lack, nor attains, since it
has no striving. And this marks it off from the Intellectual-Principle,
to which characteristically belongs the striving, the concentrated
strain towards its Form.
Yet: The Intellectual-Principle; beautiful; the most beautiful of all;
lying lapped in pure light and in clear radiance; circumscribing the
Nature of the Authentic Existents; the original of which this beautiful
world is a shadow and an image; tranquil in the fullness of glory since
in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing dark or out of
rule; a living thing in a life of blessedness: this, too, must
overwhelm with awe any that has seen it, and penetrated it, to become a
unit of its Being.
But: As one that looks up to the heavens and sees the splendour of the
stars thinks of the Maker and searches, so whoever has contemplated the
Intellectual Universe and known it and wondered for it must search
after its Maker too. What Being has raised so noble a fabric? And
where? And how? Who has begotten such a child, this
Intellectual-Principle, this lovely abundance so abundantly endowed?
The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect; nor can it be an
abundant power: it must have been before Intellect and abundance were;
these are later and things of lack; abundance had to be made abundant
and Intellection needed to know.
These are very near to the un-needing, to that which has no need of
Knowing, they have abundance and intellection authentically, as being
the first to possess. But, there is that before them which neither
needs nor possesses anything, since, needing or possessing anything
else, it would not be what it is -- the Good.
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
DETACHED CONSIDERATIONS.
1. "The Intellectual-Principle" [= the Divine Mind] -- we read [in the
Timaeus] -- "looks upon the Ideas indwelling in that Being which is the
Essentially Living [= according to Plotinus, the Intellectual Realm],
"and then" -- the text proceeds -- "the Creator judged that all the
content of that essentially living Being must find place in this lower
universe also."
Are we meant to gather that the Ideas came into being before the
Intellectual-Principle so that it "sees them" as previously existent?
The first step is to make sure whether the "Living Being" of the text
is to be distinguished from the Intellectual-Principle as another thing
than it.
It might be argued that the Intellectual-Principle is the Contemplator
and therefore that the Living-Being contemplated is not the
Intellectual-Principle but must be described as the Intellectual Object
so that the Intellectual-Principle must possess the Ideal realm as
something outside of itself.
But this would mean that it possesses images and not the realities,
since the realities are in the Intellectual Realm which it
contemplates: Reality -- we read -- is in the Authentic Existent which
contains the essential form of particular things.
No: even though the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Object
are distinct, they are not apart except for just that distinction.
Nothing in the statement cited is inconsistent with the conception that
these two constitute one substance -- though, in a unity, admitting
that distinction, of the intellectual act [as against passivity],
without which there can be no question of an Intellectual-Principle and
an Intellectual Object: what is meant is not that the contemplatory
Being possesses its vision as in some other principle, but that it
contains the Intellectual Realm within itself.
The Intelligible Object is the Intellectual-Principle itself in its
repose, unity, immobility: the Intellectual-Principle, contemplator of
that object -- of the Intellectual-Principle thus in repose is an
active manifestation of the same Being, an Act which contemplates its
unmoved phase and, as thus contemplating, stands as
Intellectual-Principle to that of which it has the intellection: it is
Intellectual-Principle in virtue of having that intellection, and at
the same time is Intellectual Object, by assimilation.
This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower Universe
what it saw existing in the Supreme, the four orders of living beings.
No doubt the passage: [of the Timaeus] seems to imply tacitly that this
planning Principle is distinct from the other two: but the three -- the
Essentially-Living, the Intellectual-Principle and this planning
Principle will, to others, be manifestly one: the truth is that, by a
common accident, a particular trend of thought has occasioned the
discrimination.
We have dealt with the first two; but the third -- this Principle which
decides to work upon the objects [the Ideas] contemplated by the
Intellectual-Principle within the Essentially-Living, to create them,
to establish them in their partial existence -- what is this third?
It is possible that in one aspect the Intellectual-Principle is the
principle of partial existence, while in another aspect it is not.
The entities thus particularized from the unity are products of the
Intellectual-Principle which thus would be, to that extent, the
separating agent. On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible;
division begins with its offspring which, of course, means with Souls:
and thus a Soul -- with its particular Souls -- may be the separative
principle.
This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the
work of the third Principle and begins within the Third: for to this
Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the
Intellectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of Soul, to
which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division.
2. . . . For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge
into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it
into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire
body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its
last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the
first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals,
that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a
man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for
it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to
the Supreme.
At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it
never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it,
participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in
Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure --
they come from the All-Soul -- and they have a Place into which to
descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from
which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that
Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by
the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun.
The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it;
for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the
lower is towards non-Being: and this is the step it takes when it is
set on self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an
image of itself -- a non-Being -- and so is wandering, as it were, into
the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image,
this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without
reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from
Authentic Being.
As long as it remains at the mid-stage it is in its own peculiar
region; but when, by a sort of inferior orientation, it looks downward,
it shapes that lower image and flings itself joyfully thither.
3. (A) . . . How, then, does Unity give rise to Multiplicity?
By its omnipresence: there is nowhere where it is not; it occupies,
therefore, all that is; at once, it is manifold -- or, rather, it is
all things.
If it were simply and solely everywhere, all would be this one thing
alone: but it is, also, in no place, and this gives, in the final
result, that, while all exists by means of it, in virtue of its
omnipresence, all is distinct from it in virtue of its being nowhere.
But why is it not merely present everywhere but in addition
nowhere-present?
Because, universality demands a previous unity. It must, therefore,
pervade all things and make all, but not be the universe which it
makes.
(B) The Soul itself must exist as Seeing -- with the
Intellectual-Principle as the object of its vision -- it is
undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see: in other
words, Soul is Matter to [its determinant] the Intellectual-Principle.
(C) When we exercise intellection upon ourselves, we are, obviously,
observing an intellective nature, for otherwise we would not be able to
have that intellection.
We know, and it is ourselves that we know; therefore we know the
reality of a knowing nature: therefore, before that intellection in
Act, there is another intellection, one at rest, so to speak.
Similarly, that self-intellection is an act upon a reality and upon a
life; therefore, before the Life and Real-Being concerned in the
intellection, there must be another Being and Life. In a word,
intellection is vested in the activities themselves: since, then, the
activities of self-intellection are intellective-forms, We, the
Authentic We, are the Intelligibles and self-intellection conveys the
Image of the Intellectual Sphere.
(D) The Primal is a potentiality of Movement and of Repose -- and so is
above and beyond both -- its next subsequent has rest and movement
about the Primal. Now this subsequent is the Intellectual-Principle --
so characterized by having intellection of something not identical with
itself whereas the Primal is without intellection. A knowing principle
has duality [that entailed by being the knower of something) and,
moreover, it knows itself as deficient since its virtue consists in
this knowing and not in its own bare Being.
(E) In the case of everything which has developed from possibility to
actuality the actual is that which remains self-identical for its
entire duration -- and this it is which makes perfection possible even
in things of the corporeal order, as for instance in fire but the
actual of this kind cannot be everlasting since [by the fact of their
having once existed only in potentiality] Matter has its place in them.
In anything, on the contrary, not composite [= never touched by Matter
or potentiality] and possessing actuality, that actual existence is
eternal . . . There is, however, the case, also in which a thing,
itself existing in actuality, stands as potentiality to some other form
of Being.
(F) . . . But the First is not to be envisaged as made up from Gods of
a transcendent order: no; the Authentic Existents constitute the
Intellectual-Principle with Which motion and rest begin. The Primal
touches nothing, but is the centre round which those other Beings lie
in repose and in movement. For Movement is aiming, and the Primal aims
at nothing; what could the Summit aspire to?
Has It, even, no Intellection of Itself?
It possesses Itself and therefore is said in general terms to know
itself . . . But intellection does not mean self-ownership; it means
turning the gaze towards the Primal: now the act of intellection is
itself the Primal Act, and there is therefore no place for any earlier
one. The Being projecting this Act transcends the Act so that
Intellection is secondary to the Being in which it resides.
Intellection is not the transcendently venerable thing -- neither
Intellection in general nor even the Intellection of The Good. Apart
from and over any Intellection stands The Good itself.
The Good therefore needs no consciousness.
What sort of consciousness can be conceived in it?
Consciousness of the Good as existent or non-existent?
If of existent Good, that Good exists before and without any such
consciousness: if the act of consciousness produces that Good, then The
Good was not previously in existence -- and, at once, the very
consciousness falls to the ground since it is, no longer consciousness
of The Good.
But would not all this mean that the First does not even live?
The First cannot be said to live since it is the source of Life.
All that has self-consciousness and self-intellection is derivative; it
observes itself in order, by that activity, to become master of its
Being: and if it study itself this can mean only that ignorance inheres
in it and that it is of its own nature lacking and to be made perfect
by Intellection.
All thinking and knowing must, here, be eliminated: the addition
introduces deprivation and deficiency.
__________________________________________________________________
THE FOURTH ENNEAD
__________________________________________________________________
FIRST TRACTATE.
ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL (1).
1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the
Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but
containing also souls, since every soul in this lower sphere has come
thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world
belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division.
There the Intellectual-Principle is a concentrated all -- nothing of it
distinguished or divided -- and in that kosmos of unity all souls are
concentrated also, with no spatial discrimination.
But there is a difference:
The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to
partition. Soul, there without distinction and partition, has yet a
nature lending itself to divisional existence: its division is
secession, entry into body.
In view of this seceding and the ensuing partition we may legitimately
speak of it as a partible thing.
But if so, how can it still be described as indivisible?
In that the secession is not of the soul entire; something of it holds
its ground, that in it which recoils from separate existence.
The entity, therefore, described as "consisting of the undivided soul
and of the soul divided among bodies," contains a soul which is at once
above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this
sphere, like a radius from a centre.
Thus it is that, entering this realm, it possesses still the vision
inherent to that superior phase in virtue of which it unchangingly
maintains its integral nature. Even here it is not exclusively the
partible soul: it is still the impartible as well: what in it knows
partition is parted without partibility; undivided as giving itself to
the entire body, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective
in every part.
__________________________________________________________________
SECOND TRACTATE.
ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL (2).
1. In our attempt to elucidate the Essence of the soul, we show it to
be neither a material fabric nor, among immaterial things, a harmony.
The theory that it is some final development, some entelechy, we pass
by, holding this to be neither true as presented nor practically
definitive.
No doubt we make a very positive statement about it when we declare it
to belong to the Intellectual Kind, to be of the divine order; but a
deeper penetration of its nature is demanded.
In that allocation we were distinguishing things as they fall under the
Intellectual or the sensible, and we placed the soul in the former
class; now, taking its membership of the Intellectual for granted, we
must investigate by another path the more specific characteristics of
its nature.
There are, we hold, things primarily apt to partition, tending by sheer
nature towards separate existence: they are things in which no part is
identical either with another part or with the whole, while, also their
part is necessarily less than the total and whole: these are magnitudes
of the realm of sense, masses, each of which has a station of its own
so that none can be identically present in entirety at more than one
point at one time.
But to that order is opposed Essence [Real-Being]; this is in no degree
susceptible of partition; it is unparted and impartible; interval is
foreign to it, cannot enter into our idea of it: it has no need of
place and is not, in diffusion or as an entirety, situated within any
other being: it is poised over all beings at once, and this is not in
the sense of using them as a base but in their being neither capable
nor desirous of existing independently of it; it is an essence
eternally unvaried: it is common to all that follows upon it: it is
like the circle's centre to which all the radii are attached while
leaving it unbrokenly in possession of itself, the starting point of
their course and of their essential being, the ground in which they all
participate: thus the indivisible is the principle of these divided
existences and in their very outgoing they remain enduringly in contact
with that stationary essence.
So far we have the primarily indivisible -- supreme among the
Intellectual and Authentically Existent -- and we have its contrary,
the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also
another Kind, of earlier rank than the sensible yet near to it and
resident within it -- an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of
part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The bodies are separate, and
the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while,
still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since
amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed
complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we may think of
colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be
present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and
yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations.
In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility.
But, on the other hand, that first utterly indivisible Kind must be
accompanied by a subsequent Essence, engendered by it and holding
indivisibility from it but, in virtue of the necessary outgo from
source, tending firmly towards the contrary, the wholly partible; this
secondary Essence will take an intermediate Place between the first
substance, the undivided, and that which is divisible in material
things and resides in them. Its presence, however, will differ in one
respect from that of colour and quantity; these, no doubt, are present
identically and entire throughout diverse material masses, but each
several manifestation of them is as distinct from every other as the
mass is from the mass.
The magnitude present in any mass is definitely one thing, yet its
identity from part to part does not imply any such community as would
entail common experience; within that identity there is diversity, for
it is a condition only, not the actual Essence.
The Essence, very near to the impartible, which we assert to belong to
the Kind we are now dealing with, is at once an Essence and an entrant
into body; upon embodiment, it experiences a partition unknown before
it thus bestowed itself.
In whatsoever bodies it occupies -- even the vastest of all, that in
which the entire universe is included -- it gives itself to the whole
without abdicating its unity.
This unity of an Essence is not like that of body, which is a unit by
the mode of continuous extension, the mode of distinct parts each
occupying its own space. Nor is it such a unity as we have dealt with
in the case of quality.
The nature, at once divisible and indivisible, which we affirm to be
soul has not the unity of an extended thing: it does not consist of
separate sections; its divisibility lies in its presence at every point
of the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in the total
and entire in any part.
To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and
its power, the divinity and wonder of its being, as a nature
transcending the sphere of Things.
Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass: it exists here and
yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered
identity: thus it is "parted and not parted," or, better, it has never
known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a
self-gathered integral, and is "parted among bodies" merely in the
sense that bodies, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot
receive it unless in some partitive mode; the partition, in other
words, is an occurrence in body not in soul.
2. It can be demonstrated that soul must, necessarily, be of just this
nature and that there can be no other soul than such a being, one
neither wholly partible but both at once.
If it had the nature of body it would consist of isolated members each
unaware of the conditions of every other; there would be a particular
soul -- say a soul of the finger -- answering as a distinct and
independent entity to every local experience; in general terms, there
would be a multiplicity of souls administering each individual; and,
moreover, the universe would be governed not by one soul but by an
incalculable number, each standing apart to itself. But, without a
dominant unity, continuity is meaningless.
The theory that "Impressions reach the leading-principle by progressive
stages" must be dismissed as mere illusion.
In the first place, it affirms without investigation a "leading" phase
of the soul.
What can justify this assigning of parts to the soul, the
distinguishing one part from another? What quantity, or what difference
of quality, can apply to a thing defined as a self-consistent whole of
unbroken unity?
Again, would perception be vested in that leading principle alone, or
in the other phases as well?
If a given experience bears only on that "leading principle," it would
not be felt as lodged in any particular members of the organism; if, on
the other hand, it fastens on some other phase of the soul -- one not
constituted for sensation -- that phase cannot transmit any experience
to the leading principle, and there can be no sensation.
Again, suppose sensation vested in the "leading-principle" itself:
then, a first alternative, it will be felt in some one part of that
[some specifically sensitive phase], the other part excluding a
perception which could serve no purpose; or, in the second alternative,
there will be many distinct sensitive phases, an infinite number, with
difference from one to another. In that second case, one sensitive
phase will declare "I had this sensation primarily"; others will have
to say "I felt the sensation that rose elsewhere"; but either the site
of the experience will be a matter of doubt to every phase except the
first, or each of the parts of the soul will be deceived into
allocating the occurrence within its own particular sphere.
If, on the contrary, the sensation is vested not merely in the "leading
principle," but in any and every part of the soul, what special
function raises the one rather than the other into that leading rank,
or why is the sensation to be referred to it rather than elsewhere? And
how, at this, account for the unity of the knowledge brought in by
diverse senses, by eyes, by ears?
On the other hand, if the soul is a perfect unity -- utterly strange to
part, a self-gathered whole -- if it continuously eludes all touch of
multiplicity and divisibility -- then, no whole taken up into it can
ever be ensouled; soul will stand as circle-centre to every object
[remote on the circumference], and the entire mass of a living being is
soulless still.
There is, therefore, no escape: soul is, in the degree indicated, one
and many, parted and impartible. We cannot question the possibility of
a thing being at once a unity and multi-present, since to deny this
would be to abolish the principle which sustains and administers the
universe; there must be a Kind which encircles and supports all and
conducts all with wisdom, a principle which is multiple since existence
is multiple, and yet is one soul always since a container must be a
unity: by the multiple unity of its nature, it will furnish life to the
multiplicity of the series of an all; by its impartible unity, it will
conduct a total to wise ends.
In the case of things not endowed with intelligence, the
"leading-principle" is their mere unity -- a lower reproduction of the
soul's efficiency.
This is the deeper meaning of the profound passage [in the Timaeus],
where we read "By blending the impartible, eternally unchanging essence
with that in division among bodies, he produced a third form of essence
partaking of both qualities."
Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many; the
Ideal-Form resident in body is many and one; bodies themselves are
exclusively many; the Supreme is exclusively one.
__________________________________________________________________
THIRD TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (1).
1. The soul: what dubious questions concerning it admit of solution, or
where we must abide our doubt -- with, at least, the gain of
recognizing the problem that confronts us -- this is matter well worth
attention. On what subject can we more reasonably expend the time
required by minute discussion and investigation? Apart from much else,
it is enough that such an enquiry illuminates two grave questions: of
what sphere the soul is the principle, and whence the soul itself
springs. Moreover, we will be only obeying the ordinance of the God who
bade us know ourselves.
Our general instinct to seek and learn, our longing to possess
ourselves of whatsoever is lovely in the vision will, in all reason,
set us enquiring into the nature of the instrument with which we
search.
Now even in the universal Intellect [Divine Mind] there was duality, so
that we would expect differences of condition in things of part: how
some things rather than others come to be receptacles of the divine
beings will need to be examined; but all this we may leave aside until
we are considering the mode in which soul comes to occupy body. For the
moment we return to our argument against those who maintain our souls
to be offshoots from the soul of the universe [parts and an identity
modally parted].
Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against
the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the All-Soul -- the
considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is
intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that
equality of intellection.
They will object that parts must necessarily fall under one ideal-form
with their wholes. And they will adduce Plato as expressing their view
where, in demonstrating that the All is ensouled, he says "As our body
is a portion of the body of the All, so our soul is a portion of the
soul of the All." It is admitted on clear evidence that we are borne
along by the Circuit of the All; we will be told that -- taking
character and destiny from it, strictly inbound with it -- we must
derive our souls, also, from what thus bears us up, and that as within
ourselves every part absorbs from our soul so, analogically, we,
standing as parts to the universe, absorb from the Soul of the All as
parts of it. They will urge also that the dictum "The collective soul
cares for all the unensouled," carries the same implication and could
be uttered only in the belief that nothing whatever of later origin
stands outside the soul of the universe, the only soul there can be
there to concern itself with the unensouled.
2. To this our first answer is that to place certain things under one
identical class -- by admitting an identical range of operation -- is
to make them of one common species, and puts an end to all mention of
part; the reasonable conclusion would be, on the contrary, that there
is one identical soul, every separate manifestation being that soul
complete.
Our opponents after first admitting the unity go on to make our soul
dependent on something else, something in which we have no longer the
soul of this or that, even of the universe, but a soul of nowhere, a
soul belonging neither to the kosmos, nor to anything else, and yet
vested with all the function inherent to the kosmic soul and to that of
every ensouled thing.
The soul considered as an entirety cannot be a soul of any one given
thing -- since it is an Essence [a divine Real-Being] -- or, at least,
there must be a soul which is not exclusively the soul of any
particular thing, and those attached to particulars must so belong
merely in some mode of accident.
In such questions as this it is important to clarify the significance
of "part."
Part, as understood of body -- uniform or varied -- need not detain us;
it is enough to indicate that, when part is mentioned in respect of
things whose members are alike, it refers to mass and not to ideal-form
[specific idea]: take for example, whiteness: the whiteness in a
portion of milk is not a part of the whiteness of milk in general: we
have the whiteness of a portion not a portion of whiteness; for
whiteness is utterly without magnitude; has nothing whatever to do with
quantity.
That is all we need say with regard to part in material things; but
part in the unembodied may be taken in various ways. We may think of it
in the sense familiar in numbers, "two" a part of the standard "ten" --
in abstract numbers of course -- or as we think of a segment of a
circle, or line [abstractly considered], or, again, of a section or
branch of knowledge.
In the case of the units of reckoning and of geometrical figure,
exactly as in that of corporeal masses, partition must diminish the
total; the part must be less than the whole; for these are things of
quantity, and have their being as things of quantity; and -- since they
are not the ideal-form Quantity -- they are subject to increase and
decrease.
Now in such a sense as this, part cannot be affirmed of the soul.
The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the
All-Soul as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent
units.
Such a conception would entail many absurdities:
The Ten could not be [essentially] a unity [the Soul would be an
aggregation, not a self-standing Real-Being] and, further -- unless
every one of the single constituents were itself an All-Soul -- the
All-Soul would be formed of non-souls.
Again, it is admitted that the particular soul -- this "part of the
All-Soul -- is of one ideal-form with it, but this does not entail the
relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts
there is nothing inevitably making any portion uniform with the total:
take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we may divide it in
different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided
into triangles; all sorts of different figures are possible: yet an
absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul.
In a line, no doubt, the part is inevitably a line; but even here there
is a necessary difference in size; and if, in the case of the soul we
similarly called upon magnitude as the distinction between constituents
and collective soul, then soul, thus classed by magnitude becomes
quantitative, and is simply body.
But it is admitted that all souls are alike and are entireties;
clearly, soul is not subject to part in the sense in which magnitudes
are: our opponents themselves would not consent to the notion of the
All-Soul being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they
would be doing, annulling the All-Soul -- if any collective soul
existed at all -- making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it
like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being
described as a portion of the total thing, wine.
Next there is the conception of the individual soul as a part in the
sense in which we speak of some single proposition as a part of the
science entire.
The theorem is separate, but the science stands as one undivided thing,
the expression and summed efficiency [energy] of each constituent
notion: this is partition without severance; each item potentially
includes the whole science, which itself remains an unbroken total.
Is this the appropriate parallel?
No; in such a relationship the All-Soul, of which the particular souls
are to be a part, would not be the soul of any definite thing, but an
entity standing aloof; that means that it would not even be the soul of
the Kosmos; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls;
thus all alike would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there
would be no reason for making any such distinction.
3. Is it a question of part in the sense that, taking one living being,
the soul in a finger might be called a part of the soul entire?
This would carry the alternative that either there is no soul outside
of body, or that -- no soul being within body -- the thing described as
the soul of the universe is, none the less, outside the body of the
universe. That is a point to be investigated, but for the present we
must consider what kind of soul this parallel would give us.
If the particular soul is a part of the All-Soul only in the sense that
this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such
a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the
identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing,
multi-present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul
that is a part against a soul that is an all -- especially where an
identical power is present. Even difference of function, as in eyes and
ears, cannot warrant the assertion of distinct parts concerned in each
separate act -- with other parts again making allotment of faculty --
all is met by the notion of one identical thing, but a thing in which a
distinct power operates in each separate function. All the powers are
present either in seeing or in hearing; the difference in impression
received is due to the difference in the organs concerned; all the
varying impressions are our various responses to Ideal-forms that can
be taken in a variety of modes.
A further proof [of the unity of Soul] is that perception demands a
common gathering place; every organ has its distinct function, and is
competent only upon its own material, and must interpret each several
experience in its own fashion; the judgement upon these impressions
must, then, be vested in some one principle, a judge informed upon all
that is said and done.
But again: "Everywhere, Unity": in the variety of functions if each
"part of the soul" were as distinct as are the entrant sensations, none
of those parts could have knowledge; awareness would belong only to
that judging faculty -- or, if local, every such act of awareness would
stand quite unrelated to any other. But since the soul is a rational
soul, by the very same title by which it is an All-Soul, and is called
the rational soul, in the sense of being a whole [and so not merely
"reasoning locally"] , then what is thought of as a part must in
reality be no part but the identity of an unparted thing.
4. But if this is the true account of the unity of soul, we must be
able to meet the problems that ensue: firstly, the difficulty of one
thing being present at the same moment in all things; and, secondly,
the difficulty of soul in body as against soul not embodied.
We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this
would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the
universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul
does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul,
while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied
thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the
human soul can go free of the body but the All-Soul not, though they
are one and the same?
There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle;
by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial
things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue
of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain
how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such
differentiated souls can remain one thing.
A possible solution may be offered:
The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the
differentiated souls -- the All-Soul, with the others -- issue from the
unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association.
They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to
any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they
strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as
light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that,
and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance.
The All-Soul would always remain above, since essentially it has
nothing to do with descent or with the lower, or with any tendency
towards this sphere: the other souls would become ours [become
"partial," individual in us] because their lot is cast for this sphere,
and because they are solicited by a thing [the body] which invites
their care.
The one -- the lowest soul in the to the All-Soul -- would correspond
to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the
whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some
rotted part of the growth -- for this is the ratio of the animated body
to the universe -- while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with
the higher parts of the All-Soul, may be imaged as the gardener
concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to
amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the
healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the
service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent
upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound.
5. But what place is left for the particular souls, yours and mine and
another's?
May we suppose the Soul to be appropriated on the lower ranges to some
individual, but to belong on the higher to that other sphere?
At this there would be a Socrates as long as Socrates' soul remained in
body; but Socrates ceases to exist, precisely on attainment of the
highest.
Now nothing of Real Being is ever annulled.
In the Supreme, the Intellectual-Principles are not annulled, for in
their differentiation there is no bodily partition, no passing of each
separate phase into a distinct unity; every such phase remains in full
possession of that identical being. It is exactly so with the souls.
By their succession they are linked to the several
Intellectual-Principles, for they are the expression, the Logos, of the
Intellectual-Principles, of which they are the unfolding; brevity has
opened out to multiplicity; by that point of their being which least
belongs to the partial order, they are attached each to its own
Intellectual original: they have already chosen the way of division;
but to the extreme they cannot go; thus they keep, at once,
identification and difference; each soul is permanently a unity [a
self] and yet all are, in their total, one being.
Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all;
those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the
Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which
abides in the Supreme is the one expression or Logos of the
Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles,
partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the
Supreme.
6. But how comes it that while the All-Soul has produced a kosmos, the
soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and
contains, it too, all things in itself?
We have indicated that a thing may enter and dwell at the same time in
various places; this ought to be explained, and the enquiry would show
how an identity resident simultaneously here and there may, in its
separate appearances, act or react -- or both -- after distinct modes;
but the matter deserves to be examined in a special discussion.
To return, then: how and why has the All-Soul produced a kosmos, while
the particular souls simply administer some one part of it?
In the first place, we are not surprised when men of identical
knowledge differ greatly in effective power.
But the reason, we will be asked.
The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among
these souls, the one never having fallen away from the All-Soul, but
dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received
their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when
their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already
prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one
[the creative All-Soul] looks towards the universal
Intellectual-Principle [the exemplar of all that can be], while the
others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that
which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could
have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator -- the
work accomplished before them -- an impediment inevitable whichsoever
of the souls were first to operate.
But it is safer to account for the creative act by nearer connection
with the over-world; the souls whose tendency is exercised within the
Supreme have the greater power; immune in that pure seat they create
securely; for the greater power takes the least hurt from the material
within which it operates; and this power remains enduringly attached to
the over-world: it creates, therefore, self gathered and the created
things gather round it; the other souls, on the contrary, themselves go
forth; that can mean only that they have deserted towards the abyss; a
main phase in them is drawn downward and pulls them with it in the
desire towards the lower.
The "secondary and tertiary souls," of which we hear, must be
understood in the sense of closer or remoter position: it is much as in
ourselves the relation to the Supreme is not identical from soul to
soul; some of us are capable of becoming Uniate, others of striving and
almost attaining, while a third rank is much less apt; it is a matter
of the degree or powers of the soul by which our expression is
determined -- the first degree dominant in the one person, the second,
the third [the merely animal life] in others while, still, all of us
contain all the powers.
7. So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to
imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul?
The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it
expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the
heavens are ensouled -- a teaching which he maintains in the
observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when
we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul; how, he
asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total.
He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the
other souls brought into existence after the All-Soul, but compounded
from the same mixing bowl"; secondary and tertiary are duly marked off
from the primal but every form of soul is presented as being of
identical ideal-nature with the All-Soul.
As for saying of the Phaedrus. "All that is soul cares for all that is
soulless," this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be
controlled -- fashioned, set in place or brought into being -- by
anything but the Soul. And we cannot think that there is one soul whose
nature includes this power and another without it. "The perfect soul,
that of the All," we read, "going its lofty journey, operates upon the
kosmos not by sinking into it, but, as it were, by brooding over it";
and "every perfect soul exercises this governance"; he distinguishes
the other, the soul in this sphere as "the soul when its wing is
broken."
As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic circuit, and taking
character and condition thence; this is no indication that they are
parts: soul-nature may very well take some tincture from even the
qualities of place, from water and from air; residence in this city or
in that, and the varying make-up of the body may have their influence
[upon our human souls which, yet, are no parts of place or of body].
We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over
something from the All-Soul; we do not deny the influence of the Kosmic
Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul in us [the
Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalizing] proven to be
distinct by that power of opposition.
As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that in
motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother's.
8. These considerations, amounting to the settlement of the question,
are not countered by the phenomenon of sympathy; the response between
soul and soul is due to the mere fact that all spring from that
self-same soul [the next to Divine Mind] from which springs the Soul of
the All.
We have already stated that the one soul is also multiple; and we have
dealt with the different forms of relationship between part and whole:
we have investigated the different degrees existing within soul; we may
now add, briefly, that differences might be induced, also, by the
bodies with which the soul has to do, and, even more, by the character
and mental operations carried over from the conduct of the previous
lives. "The life-choice made by a soul has a correspondence" -- we read
-- "with its former lives."
As regards the nature of soul in general, the differences have been
defined in the passage in which we mentioned the secondary and tertiary
orders and laid down that, while all souls are all-comprehensive, each
ranks according to its operative phase -- one becoming Uniate in the
achieved fact, another in knowledge, another in desire, according to
the distinct orientation by which each is, or tends to become, what it
looks upon. The very fulfillment and perfectionment attainable by souls
cannot but be different.
But, if in the total the organization in which they have their being is
compact of variety -- as it must be since every Reason-Principle is a
unity of multiplicity and variety, and may be thought of as a psychic
animated organism having many shapes at its command -- if this is so
and all constitutes a system in which being is not cut adrift from
being, if there is nothing chance -- borne among beings as there is
none even in bodily organisms, then it follows that Number must enter
into the scheme; for, once again, Being must be stable; the members of
the Intellectual must possess identity, each numerically one; this is
the condition of individuality. Where, as in bodily masses, the Idea is
not essentially native, and the individuality is therefore in flux,
existence under ideal form can rise only out of imitation of the
Authentic Existences; these last, on the contrary, not rising out of
any such conjunction [as the duality of Idea and dead Matter] have
their being in that which is numerically one, that which was from the
beginning, and neither becomes what it has not been nor can cease to be
what it is.
Even supposing Real-Beings [such as soul] to be produced by some other
principle, they are certainly not made from Matter; or, if they were,
the creating principle must infuse into them, from within itself,
something of the nature of Real-Being; but, at this, it would itself
suffer change, as it created more or less. And, after all, why should
it thus produce at any given moment rather than remain for ever
stationary?
Moreover the produced total, variable from more to less, could not be
an eternal: yet the soul, it stands agreed, is eternal.
But what becomes of the soul's infinity if it is thus fixed?
The infinity is a matter of power: there is question, not of the soul's
being divisible into an infinite number of parts, but of an infinite
possible effectiveness: it is infinity in the sense in which the
Supreme God, also, is free of all bound.
This means that it is no external limit that defines the individual
being or the extension of souls any more than of God; on the contrary
each in right of its own power is all that it chooses to be: and we are
not to think of it as going forth from itself [losing its unity by any
partition]: the fact is simply that the element within it, which is apt
to entrance into body, has the power of immediate projection any
whither: the soul is certainly not wrenched asunder by its presence at
once in foot and in finger. Its presence in the All is similarly
unbroken; over its entire range it exists in every several part of
everything having even vegetal life, even in a part cut off from the
main; in any possible segment it is as it is at its source. For the
body of the All is a unit, and soul is everywhere present to it as to
one thing.
When some animal rots and a multitude of others spring from it, the
Life-Principle now present is not the particular soul that was in the
larger body; that body has ceased to be receptive of soul, or there
would have been no death; what happens is that whatsoever in the
product of the decay is apt material for animal existence of one kind
or another becomes ensouled by the fact that soul is nowhere lacking,
though a recipient of soul may be. This new ensouling does not mean,
however, an increase in the number of souls: all depend from the one
or, rather, all remains one: it is as with ourselves; some elements are
shed, others grow in their place; the soul abandons the discarded and
flows into the newcoming as long as the one soul of the man holds its
ground; in the All the one soul holds its ground for ever; its distinct
contents now retain soul and now reject it, but the total of spiritual
beings is unaffected.
9. But we must examine how soul comes to inhabit the body -- the manner
and the process -- a question certainly of no minor interest.
The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms.
Firstly, there is the entry -- metensomatosis -- of a soul present in
body by change from one [wholly material] frame to another or the entry
-- not known as metensomatosis, since the nature of the earlier
habitacle is not certainly definable -- of a soul leaving an aerial or
fiery body for one of earth.
Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of
body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul,
and this entry especially demands investigation.
What then can be thought to have happened when soul, utterly clean from
body, first comes into commerce with the bodily nature?
It is reasonable, necessary even, to begin with the Soul of the All.
Notice that if we are to explain and to be clear, we are obliged to use
such words as "entry" and "ensoulment," though never was this All
unensouled, never did body subsist with soul away, never was there
Matter unelaborate; we separate, the better to understand; there is
nothing illegitimate in the verbal and mental sundering of things which
must in fact be co-existent.
The true doctrine may be stated as follows:
In the absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is
no other place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go
forth it must, it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also,
exists.
While the Soul [as an eternal, a Divine Being] is at rest -- in rest
firmly based on Repose, the Absolute -- yet, as we may put it, that
huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the
extreme bourne of its light and dwindles to darkness; this darkness,
now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape;
for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul,
may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can
absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest.
Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never
been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he
has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that
can serve to its Being -- as far as it can share in Being -- or to its
beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends,
but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the
kosmos is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present
to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul
bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing.
The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it
stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the
sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope,
for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so
far-reaching a nature -- a thing unbounded -- as to embrace the entire
body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends,
there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul
would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as
broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point
at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul
to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle
proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate
a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea [the Divine
forming power] which it conveys.
10. In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the
unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.
We ascend from air, light, sun -- or, moon and light and sun -- in
detail, to these things as constituting a total -- though a total of
degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the [kosmic]
Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our
survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it.
That suite [the lower and material world] we take to be the very last
effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach.
Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the
very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate [the material
world] itself receives its share of the general light, something of the
nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay
in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the
efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this
rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in
animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in
the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of
soul's own Real-Being.
We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to
any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any
such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied
art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing
dim and feeble copies -- toys, things of no great worth -- and it is
dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be
produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things
by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and
those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later
level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short
of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle
must be aiming; in that other world [under the soul but above the
material] the entire shape [as well as the idea] comes from soul, and
all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so
that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all
that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation,
the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some
peculiar purpose.
Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its
powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a
double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within
outwards towards the new production.
In soulless entities, the outgo [natural to everything] remains
dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness
whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to
bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of
possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and
an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to
all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is
commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it
communicates reason to the body -- an image of the reason within
itself, just as the life given to the body is an image of Real-Being --
and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of
which it contains the Reason-Forms.
The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and
of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains all.
11. I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure
the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues,
showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though
this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the
more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place
especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something
reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch
an image of it.
It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content
reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it
participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a
Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle:
thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose
likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated
and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and
representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for
the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to
descend into the created.
The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that
sphere -- let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos -- and
immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul
from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of
this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the
overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates
from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises -- as far
as, through soul, anything can -- from the lower to the highest.
Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote:
there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures
as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial
position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.
These Beings [the Reason-Principles of this sphere] are divine in
virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul
thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and
through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of
the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that
soul in which they have their being.
12. The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as
it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the
Supreme: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the
divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the
Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have
descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the
heavens.
Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is
compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they
have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes
the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in
due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell
there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has
ever dwelt.
For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing
entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under
its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it
reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration,
to its established character; it is leading the things of this realm to
be of one voice and plan with the Supreme. And thus the kosmic content
is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place,
under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and
return of souls and to every purpose of the system.
We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered
scheme of the kosmos; they are not independent, but, by their descent,
they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in
harmonious association with kosmic circuit -- to the extent that their
fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are
announced by the patterns of the stars -- and out of this concordance
rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by
which all is described is the best witness to this truth.
Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way:
The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression
of the Supreme, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable
ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as
they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens,
sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is
Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from
its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate
to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of
neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the
Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of
the lower realm, one phase [the World-Soul] maintaining the unvarying
march [of the kosmic circuit] the other [the soul of the Individual]
adopting itself to times and season.
The depth of the descent, also, will differ -- sometimes lower,
sometimes less low -- and this even in its entry into any given Kind:
all that is fixed is that each several soul descends to a recipient
indicated by affinity of condition; it moves towards the thing which it
There resembled, and enters, accordingly, into the body of man or
animal.
13. The Ineluctable, the Kosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural
principle under which each several entity is overruled to go, duly and
in order, towards that place and Kind to which it characteristically
tends, that is towards the image of its primal choice and constitution.
In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image [the
thing in the world of copy] to which its individual constitution
inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender or leader acting at
the right moment to bring it at the right moment whether into body or
into a definitely appropriate body: of its own motion it descends at
the precisely true time and enters where it must. To every Soul its own
hour; when that strikes it descends and enters the body suitable to it
as at the cry of a herald; thus all is set stirring and advancing as by
a magician's power or by some mighty traction; it is much as, in any
living thing, the soul itself effects the fulfillment of the natural
career, stirring and bringing forth, in due season, every element --
beard, horn, and all the successive stages of tendency and of output --
or, as it leads a tree through its normal course within set periods.
The Souls go forth neither under compulsion nor of freewill; or, at
least, freedom, here, is not to be regarded as action upon preference;
it is more like such a leap of the nature as moves men to the
instinctive desire of sexual union, or, in the case of some, to fine
conduct; the motive lies elsewhere than in the reason: like is destined
unfailingly to like, and each moves hither or thither at its fixed
moment.
Even the Intellectual-Principle, which is before all the kosmos, has,
it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact above, and of giving
downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose existence is
implied in the law of the universal; for the universal broods closely
over the particular; it is not from without that the law derives the
power by which it is executed; on the contrary the law is given in the
entities upon whom it falls; these bear it about with them. Let but the
moment arrive, and what it decrees will be brought to act by those
beings in whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it
prevails because it is within them; it becomes like a heavy burden, and
sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are
bidden from within.
14. Thus it comes about that this kosmos, lit with many lights,
gleaming in its souls, receives still further graces, gifts from here
and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other
Intellectual-Principles whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably
the secret of the myth in which, after Prometheus had moulded woman,
the other gods heaped gifts upon her, Hephaistos "blending the clay
with moisture and bestowing the human voice and the form of a goddess";
Aphrodite bringing her gifts, and the Graces theirs, and other gods
other gifts, and finally calling her by the name [Pandora] which tells
of gift and of all giving -- for all have added something to this
formation brought to being by a Promethean, a fore-thinking power. As
for the rejection of Prometheus' gift by after-thought, Epimetheus,
what can this signify but that the wiser choice is to remain in the
Intellectual realm? Pandora's creator is fettered, to signify that he
is in some sense held by his own creation; such a fettering is external
and the release by Hercules tells that there is power in Prometheus, so
that he need not remain in bonds.
Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the
bestowal of gifts upon the kosmos as harmonizes with our explanation of
the universal system.
15. The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first
to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium
by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude [physical
extension] they proceed to bodies progressively more earthy. Some even
plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass,
stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they
carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness.
As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in the
bodies entered, or to the accidents of life, or to upbringing, or to
inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these influences
together, or to specific combinations of them.
Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the destiny
ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their own: there are
those who, while they accept what must be borne, have the strength of
self-mastery in all that is left to their own act; they have given
themselves to another dispensation: they live by the code of the
aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the
Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the kosmos, out of
soul-movements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code,
therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon them,
linking their sequents back to them, keeping unshakeably true all that
is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature, and leading
round by all appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt.
In fine all diversity of condition in the lower spheres is determined
by the descendent beings themselves.
16. The punishment justly overtaking the wicked must therefore be
ascribed to the kosmic order which leads all in accordance with the
right.
But what of chastisements, poverty, illness, falling upon the good
outside of all justice? These events, we will be told, are equally
interwoven into the world order and fall under prediction, and must
consequently have a cause in the general reason: are they therefore to
be charged to past misdoing?
No: such misfortunes do not answer to reasons established in the nature
of things; they are not laid up in the master-facts of the universe,
but were merely accidental sequents: a house falls, and anyone that
chances to be underneath is killed, no matter what sort of man he be:
two objects are moving in perfect order -- or one if you like -- but
anything getting in the way is wounded or trampled down. Or we may
reason that the undeserved stroke can be no evil to the sufferer in
view of the beneficent interweaving of the All or again, no doubt, that
nothing is unjust that finds justification in a past history.
We may not think of some things being fitted into a system with others
abandoned to the capricious; if things must happen by cause, by natural
sequences, under one Reason-Principle and a single set scheme, we must
admit that the minor equally with the major is fitted into that order
and pattern.
Wrong-doing from man to man is wrong in the doer and must be imputed,
but, as belonging to the established order of the universe is not a
wrong even as regards the innocent sufferer; it is a thing that had to
be, and, if the sufferer is good, the issue is to his gain. For we
cannot think that this ordered combination proceeds without God and
justice; we must take it to be precise in the distribution of due,
while, yet, the reasons of things elude us, and to our ignorance the
scheme presents matter of censure.
17. Various considerations explain why the Souls going forth from the
Intellectual proceed first to the heavenly regions. The heavens, as the
noblest portion of sensible space, would border with the least exalted
of the Intellectual, and will, therefore, be first ensouled first to
participate as most apt; while what is of earth is at the very
extremity of progression, least endowed towards participation, remotest
from the unembodied.
All the souls, then, shine down upon the heavens and spend there the
main of themselves and the best; only their lower phases illuminate the
lower realms; and those souls which descend deepest show their light
furthest down -- not themselves the better for the depth to which they
have penetrated.
There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle
of light shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another
circle, light from light; outside that again, not another circle of
light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow.
The last we may figure to ourselves as a revolving circle, or rather a
sphere, of a nature to receive light from that third realm, its next
higher, in proportion to the light which that itself receives. Thus all
begins with the great light, shining self-centred; in accordance with
the reigning plan [that of emanation] this gives forth its brilliance;
the later [divine] existents [souls] add their radiation -- some of
them remaining above, while there are some that are drawn further
downward, attracted by the splendour of the object they illuminate.
These last find that their charges need more and more care: the
steersman of a storm-tossed ship is so intent on saving it that he
forgets his own interest and never thinks that he is recurrently in
peril of being dragged down with the vessel; similarly the souls are
intent upon contriving for their charges and finally come to be pulled
down by them; they are fettered in bonds of sorcery, gripped and held
by their concern for the realm of Nature.
If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect,
self-sufficing, in peril from no outside influence the soul now spoken
of as indwelling would not occupy the body; it would infuse life while
clinging, entire, within the Supreme.
18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether
the soul uses deliberate reason before its descent and again when it
has left the body.
Reasoning is for this sphere; it is the act of the soul fallen into
perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength: the need of
deliberation goes with the less self-sufficing intelligence; craftsmen
faced by a difficulty stop to consider; where there is no problem their
art works on by its own forthright power.
But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be
called reasoning souls?
One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy
issue, should occasion arise: but all is met by repudiating the
particular kind of reasoning intended [the earthly and discursive
type]; we may represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows
uninterruptedly from the Intellectual-Principle in them, an inherent
state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real; in this way
they would be users of reason even when in that overworld. We certainly
cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though
they may occupy bodies in the heavenly region, they are essentially in
the Intellectual: and very surely the deliberation of doubt and
difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There; all
their act must fall into place by sheer force of their nature; there
can be no question of commanding or of taking counsel; they will know,
each, what is to be communicated from another, by present
consciousness. Even in our own case here, eyes often know what is not
spoken; and There all is pure, every being is, as it were, an eye,
nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech,
everything is seen and known. As for the Celestials [the Daimones] and
souls in the air, they may well use speech; for all such are simply
Animate [= Beings].
19. Are we to think of the indivisible phase of the soul and the
divided as making one thing in a coalescence; or is the indivisible in
a place of its own and under conditions of its own, the divisible being
a sequent upon it, a separate part of it, as distinct as the reasoning
phase is from the unreasoning?
The answer to this question will emerge when we make plain the nature
and function to be attributed to each.
The indivisible phase is mentioned [in the passage of Plato] without
further qualification; but not so the divisible; "that soul" we read
"which becomes divisible in bodies" -- and even this last is presented
as becoming partible, not as being so once for all.
"In bodies": we must then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is
required to produce life in the corporeal, and what there must be of
soul present throughout such a body, such a completed organism.
Now, every sensitive power -- by the fact of being sensitive throughout
-- tends to become a thing of parts: present at every distinct point of
sensitiveness, it may be thought of as divided. In the sense, however,
that it is present as a whole at every such point, it cannot be said to
be wholly divided; it "becomes divisible in body." We may be told that
no such partition is implied in any sensations but those of touch; but
this is not so; where the participant is body [of itself insensitive
and non-transmitting] that divisibility in the sensitive agent will be
a condition of all other sensations, though in less degree than in the
case of touch. Similarly the vegetative function in the soul, with that
of growth, indicates divisibility; and, admitting such locations as
that of desire at the liver and emotional activity at the heart, we
have the same result. It is to be noted, however, as regards these [the
less corporeal] sensations, that the body may possibly not experience
them as a fact of the conjoint thing but in another mode, as rising
within some one of the elements of which it has been participant [as
inherent, purely, in some phase of the associated soul]: reasoning and
the act of the intellect, for instance, are not vested in the body;
their task is not accomplished by means of the body which in fact is
detrimental to any thinking on which it is allowed to intrude.
Thus the indivisible phase of the soul stands distinct from the
divisible; they do not form a unity, but, on the contrary, a whole
consisting of parts, each part a self-standing thing having its own
peculiar virtue. None the less, if that phase which becomes divisible
in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power,
then this one same thing [the soul in body] may be at once indivisible
and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend, a thing made up of its
own divisible self with, in addition, the quality that it derives from
above itself.
20. Here a question rises to which we must find an answer: whether
these and the other powers which we call "parts" of the Soul are
situated, all, in place; or whether some have place and standpoint,
others not; or whether again none are situated in place.
The matter is difficult: if we do not allot to each of the parts of the
Soul some form of Place, but leave all unallocated -- no more within
the body than outside it -- we leave the body soulless, and are at a
loss to explain plausibly the origin of acts performed by means of the
bodily organs: if, on the other hand, we suppose some of those phases
to be [capable of situation] in place but others not so, we will be
supposing that those parts to which we deny place are ineffective in
us, or, in other words, that we do not possess our entire soul.
This simply shows that neither the soul entire nor any part of it may
be considered to be within the body as in a space: space is a
container, a container of body; it is the home of such things as
consist of isolated parts, things, therefore, in which at no point is
there an entirety; now, the soul is not a body and is no more contained
than containing.
Neither is it in body as in some vessel: whether as vessel or as place
of location, the body would remain, in itself, unensouled. If we are to
think of some passing-over from the soul -- that self-gathered thing --
to the containing vessel, then soul is diminished by just as much as
the vessel takes.
Space, again, in the strict sense is unembodied, and is not, itself,
body; why, then, should it need soul?
Besides [if the soul were contained as in space] contact would be only
at the surface of the body, not throughout the entire mass.
Many other considerations equally refute the notion that the soul is in
body as [an object] in space; for example, this space would be shifted
with every movement, and a thing itself would carry its own space
about.
Of course if by space we understand the interval separating objects, it
is still less possible that the soul be in body as in space: such a
separating interval must be a void; but body is not a void; the void
must be that in which body is placed; body [not soul] will be in the
void.
Nor can it be in the body as in some substratum: anything in a
substratum is a condition affecting that -- a colour, a form -- but the
soul is a separate existence.
Nor is it present as a part in the whole; soul is no part of body. If
we are asked to think of soul as a part in the living total we are
faced with the old difficulty: How it is in that whole. It is certainly
not there as the wine is in the wine jar, or as the jar in the jar, or
as some absolute is self-present.
Nor can the presence be that of a whole in its part: It would be absurd
to think of the soul as a total of which the body should represent the
parts.
It is not present as Form is in Matter; for the Form as in Matter is
inseparable and, further, is something superimposed upon an already
existent thing; soul, on the contrary, is that which engenders the Form
residing within the Matter and therefore is not the Form. If the
reference is not to the Form actually present, but to Form as a thing
existing apart from all formed objects, it is hard to see how such an
entity has found its way into body, and at any rate this makes the soul
separable.
How comes it then that everyone speaks of soul as being in body?
Because the soul is not seen and the body is: we perceive the body, and
by its movement and sensation we understand that it is ensouled, and we
say that it possesses a soul; to speak of residence is a natural
sequence. If the soul were visible, an object of the senses, radiating
throughout the entire life, if it were manifest in full force to the
very outermost surface, we would no longer speak of soul as in body; we
would say the minor was within the major, the contained within the
container, the fleeting within the perdurable.
21. What does all this come to? What answer do we give to him who, with
no opinion of his own to assert, asks us to explain this presence? And
what do we say to the question whether there is one only mode of
presence of the entire soul or different modes, phase and phase?
Of the modes currently accepted for the presence of one thing in
another, none really meets the case of the soul's relation to the body.
Thus we are given as a parallel the steersman in the ship; this serves
adequately to indicate that the soul is potentially separable, but the
mode of presence, which is what we are seeking, it does not exhibit.
We can imagine it within the body in some incidental way -- for
example, as a voyager in a ship -- but scarcely as the steersman: and,
of course, too, the steersman is not omnipresent to the ship as the
soul is to the body.
May we, perhaps, compare it to the science or skill that acts through
its appropriate instruments -- through a helm, let us say, which should
happen to be a live thing -- so that the soul effecting the movements
dictated by seamanship is an indwelling directive force?
No: the comparison breaks down, since the science is something outside
of helm and ship.
Is it any help to adopt the illustration of the steersman taking the
helm, and to station the soul within the body as the steersman may be
thought to be within the material instrument through which he works?
Soul, whenever and wherever it chooses to operate, does in much that
way move the body.
No; even in this parallel we have no explanation of the mode of
presence within the instrument; we cannot be satisfied without further
search, a closer approach.
22. May we think that the mode of the soul's presence to body is that
of the presence of light to the air?
This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates
through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable
thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit
area it is dark; under the light it is lit: we have a true parallel to
what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the light
quite as much as the light in the air.
Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body
in its soul, and not its soul in the body, and says that, while there
is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region
to which body does not enter -- certain powers, that is, with which
body has no concern. And what is true of the All-Soul is true of the
others.
There are, therefore, certain soul-powers whose presence to body must
be denied.
The phases present are those which the nature of body demands: they are
present without being resident -- either in any parts of the body or in
the body as a whole.
For the purposes of sensation the sensitive phase of the soul is
present to the entire sensitive being: for the purposes of act,
differentiation begins; every soul phase operates at a point peculiar
to itself.
23. I explain: A living body is illuminated by soul: each organ and
member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to itself; the
organ is adapted to a certain function, and this fitness is the vehicle
of the soul-faculty under which the function is performed; thus the
seeing faculty acts through the eyes, the hearing faculty through the
ears, the tasting faculty through the tongue, the faculty of smelling
through the nostrils, and the faculty of sentient touch is present
throughout, since in this particular form of perception the entire body
is an instrument in the soul's service.
The vehicles of touch are mainly centred in the nerves -- which
moreover are vehicles of the faculty by which the movements of the
living being are affected -- in them the soul-faculty concerned makes
itself present; the nerves start from the brain. The brain therefore
has been considered as the centre and seat of the principle which
determines feeling and impulse and the entire act of the organism as a
living thing; where the instruments are found to be linked, there the
operating faculty is assumed to be situated. But it would be wiser to
say only that there is situated the first activity of the operating
faculty: the power to be exercised by the operator -- in keeping with
the particular instrument -- must be considered as concentrated at the
point at which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the
soul's faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the
point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the act.
Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested in the
sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the Reason-Principle
immediately above itself; downward, it is in contact with an inferior
of its own: on this analogy the uppermost member of the living being
was taken by the ancients to be obviously its seat; they lodged it in
the brain, or not exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which
is the medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the
brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to body --
at the point most receptive of the act of reason -- while something,
utterly isolated from body must be in contact with that superior thing
which is a form of soul [and not merely of the vegetative or other
quasi-corporeal forms but] of that soul apt to the appropriation of the
perceptions originating in the Reason-Principle.
Such a linking there must be, since in perception there is some element
of judging, in representation something intuitional, and since impulse
and appetite derive from representation and reason. The reasoning
faculty, therefore, is present where these experiences occur, present
not as in a place but in the fact that what is there draws upon it. As
regards perception we have already explained in what sense it is local.
But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle
of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the
blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and
blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts
the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which
has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings
to birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these
functions. Blood -- subtle, light, swift, pure -- is the vehicle most
apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where
such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the
ebullition of the passionate nature.
24. Now comes the question of the soul leaving the body; where does it
go?
It cannot remain in this world where there is no natural recipient for
it; and it cannot remain attached to anything not of a character to
hold it: it can be held here when only it is less than wise, containing
within itself something of that which lures it.
If it does contain any such alien element it gives itself, with
increasing attachment, to the sphere to which that element naturally
belongs and tends.
The space open to the soul's resort is vast and diverse; the difference
will come by the double force of the individual condition and of the
justice reigning in things. No one can ever escape the suffering
entailed by ill deeds done: the divine law is ineluctable, carrying
bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The
sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always
by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by
that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by
self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law
decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it
carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of
rising from those places of pain -- all by power of the harmony that
maintains the universal scheme.
Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer
drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their
very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of
body -- there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the
Divinity, among Those, within That, such a soul must be.
If you still ask Where, you must ask where those Beings are -- and in
your seeking, seek otherwise than with the sight, and not as one
seeking for body.
25. Now comes the question, equally calling for an answer, whether
those souls that have quitted the places of earth retain memory of
their lives -- all souls or some, of all things, or of some things,
and, again, for ever or merely for some period not very long after
their withdrawal.
A true investigation of this matter requires us to establish first what
a remembering principle must be -- I do not mean what memory is, but in
what order of beings it can occur. The nature of memory has been
indicated, laboured even, elsewhere; we still must try to understand
more clearly what characteristics are present where memory exists.
Now a memory has to do with something brought into ken from without,
something learned or something experienced; the Memory-Principle,
therefore, cannot belong to such beings as are immune from experience
and from time.
No memory, therefore, can be ascribed to any divine being, or to the
Authentic-Existent or the Intellectual-Principle: these are intangibly
immune; time does not approach them; they possess eternity centred
around Being; they know nothing of past and sequent; all is an unbroken
state of identity, not receptive of change. Now a being rooted in
unchanging identity cannot entertain memory, since it has not and never
had a state differing from any previous state, or any new intellection
following upon a former one, so as to be aware of contrast between a
present perception and one remembered from before.
But what prevents such a being [from possessing memory in the sense of]
perceiving, without variation in itself, such outside changes as, for
example, the kosmic periods?
Simply the fact that following the changes of the revolving kosmos it
would have perception of earlier and later: intuition and memory are
distinct.
We cannot hold its self-intellections to be acts of memory; this is no
question of something entering from without, to be grasped and held in
fear of an escape; if its intellections could slip away from it [as a
memory might] its very Essence [as the Hypostasis of inherent
Intellection] would be in peril.
For the same reason memory, in the current sense, cannot be attributed
to the soul in connection with the ideas inherent in its essence: these
it holds not as a memory but as a possession, though, by its very
entrance into this sphere, they are no longer the mainstay of its Act.
The Soul-action which is to be observed seems to have induced the
Ancients to ascribe memory, and "Recollection," [the Platonic
Anamnesis] to souls bringing into outward manifestation the ideas they
contain: we see at once that the memory here indicated is another kind;
it is a memory outside of time.
But, perhaps, this is treating too summarily a matter which demands
minute investigation. It might be doubted whether that recollection,
that memory, really belongs to the highest soul and not rather to
another, a dimmer, or even to the Couplement, the Living-Being. And if
to that dimmer soul, when and how has it come to be present; if to the
Couplement, again when and how?
We are driven thus to enquire into these several points: in which of
the constituents of our nature is memory vested -- the question with
which we started -- if in the soul, then in what power or part; if in
the Animate or Couplement -- which has been supposed, similarly to be
the seat of sensation -- then by what mode it is present, and how we
are to define the Couplement; finally whether sensation and
intellectual acts may be ascribed to one and the same agent, or imply
two distinct principles.
26. Now if sensations of the active order depend upon the Couplement of
soul and body, sensation must be of that double nature. Hence it is
classed as one of the shared acts: the soul, in the feeling, may be
compared to the workman in such operations as boring or weaving, the
body to the tool employed: the body is passive and menial; the soul is
active, reading such impressions as are made upon the body or discerned
by means of the body, perhaps entertaining only a judgement formed as
the result of the bodily experiences.
In such a process it is at once clear that the sensation is a shared
task; but the memory is not thus made over to the Couplement, since the
soul has from the first taken over the impression, either to retain or
to reject.
It might be ventured that memory, no less than sensation, is a function
of the Couplement, on the ground that bodily constitution determines
our memories good or bad; but the answer would come that, whether the
body happens or not to be a hindrance, the act of remembering would
still be an act of the soul. And in the case of matters learned [and
not merely felt, as corporeal experiences], how can we think of the
Couplement of soul and body as the remembering principle? Here, surely,
it must be soul alone?
We may be told that the living-being is a Couplement in the sense of
something entirely distinct formed from the two elements [so that it
might have memory though neither soul nor body had it]. But, to begin
with, it is absurd to class the living-being as neither body nor soul;
these two things cannot so change as to make a distinct third, nor can
they blend so utterly that the soul shall become a mere faculty of the
animate whole. And, further, supposing they could so blend, memory
would still be due to the soul just as in honey-wine all the sweetness
will be due to the honey.
It may be suggested the while the soul is perhaps not in itself a
remembering principle, yet that, having lost its purity and acquired
some degree of modification by its presence in body, it becomes capable
of reproducing the imprints of sensible objects and experiences, and
that, seated, as roughly speaking it is, within the body, it may
reasonably be thought capable of accepting such impressions, and in
such a manner as to retain them [thus in some sense possessing memory].
But, to begin with, these imprints are not magnitudes [are not of
corporeal nature at all]; there is no resemblance to seal impressions,
no stamping of a resistant matter, for there is neither the down-thrust
[as of the seal] nor [the acceptance] as in the wax: the process is
entirely of the intellect, though exercised upon things of sense; and
what kind of resistance [or other physical action] can be affirmed in
matters of the intellectual order, or what need can there be of body or
bodily quality as a means?
Further there is one order of which the memory must obviously belong to
the soul; it alone can remember its own movements, for example its
desires and those frustrations of desire in which the coveted thing
never came to the body: the body can have nothing to tell about things
which never approached it, and the soul cannot use the body as a means
to the remembrance of what the body by its nature cannot know.
If the soul is to have any significance -- to be a definite principle
with a function of its own -- we are forced to recognize two orders of
fact, an order in which the body is a means but all culminates in soul,
and an order which is of the soul alone. This being admitted,
aspiration will belong to soul, and so, as a consequence, will that
memory of the aspiration and of its attainment or frustration, without
which the soul's nature would fall into the category of the unstable
[that is to say of the undivine, unreal]. Deny this character of the
soul and at once we refuse it perception, consciousness, any power of
comparison, almost any understanding. Yet these powers of which,
embodied it becomes the source cannot be absent from its own nature. On
the contrary; it possesses certain activities to be expressed in
various functions whose accomplishment demands bodily organs; at its
entry it brings with it [as vested in itself alone] the powers
necessary for some of these functions, while in the case of others it
brings the very activities themselves.
Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are,
addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and dearing away,
memory will often revive. The soul is a stability; the shifting and
fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not
of its remembering -- Lethe stream may be understood in this sense --
and memory is a fact of the soul.
27. But of what soul; of that which we envisage as the more divine, by
which we are human beings, or that other which springs from the All?
Memory must be admitted in both of these, personal memories and shared
memories; and when the two souls are together, the memories also are as
one; when they stand apart, assuming that both exist and endure, each
soon for gets the other's affairs, retaining for a longer time its own.
Thus it is that the Shade of Hercules in the lower regions -- this
"Shade," as I take it, being the characteristically human part --
remembers all the action and experience of the life, since that career
was mainly of the hero's personal shaping; the other souls [soulphases]
going to constitute the joint-being could, for all their different
standing, have nothing to recount but the events of that same life,
doings which they knew from the time of their association: perhaps they
would add also some moral judgement.
What the Hercules standing outside the Shade spoke of we are not told:
what can we think that other, the freed and isolated, soul would
recount?
The soul, still a dragged captive, will tell of all the man did and
felt; but upon death there will appear, as time passes, memories of the
lives lived before, some of the events of the most recent life being
dismissed as trivial. As it grows away from the body, it will revive
things forgotten in the corporeal state, and if it passes in and out of
one body after another, it will tell over the events of the discarded
life, it will treat as present that which it has just left, and it will
remember much from the former existence. But with lapse of time it will
come to forgetfulness of many things that were mere accretion.
Then free and alone at last, what will it have to remember?
The answer to that question depends on our discovering in what faculty
of the soul memory resides.
28. Is memory vested in the faculty by which we perceive and learn? Or
does it reside in the faculty by which we set things before our minds
as objects of desire or of anger, the passionate faculty?
This will be maintained on the ground that there could scarcely be both
a first faculty in direct action and a second to remember what that
first experiences. It is certain that the desiring faculty is apt to be
stirred by what it has once enjoyed; the object presents itself again;
evidently, memory is at work; why else, the same object with the same
attraction?
But, at that, we might reasonably ascribe to the desiring faculty the
very perception of the desired objects and then the desire itself to
the perceptive faculty, and so on all through, and in the end conclude
that the distinctive names merely indicate the function which happens
to be uppermost.
Yet the perception is very different from faculty to faculty; certainly
it is sight and not desire that sees the object; desire is stirred
merely as a result of the seeing, by a transmission; its act is not in
the nature of an identification of an object seen; all is simply blind
response [automatic reaction]. Similarly with rage; sight reveals the
offender and the passion leaps; we may think of a shepherd seeing a
wolf at his flock, and a dog, seeing nothing, who springs to the scent
or the sound.
In other words the desiring faculty has had the emotion, but the trace
it keeps of the event is not a memory; it is a condition, something
passively accepted: there is another faculty that was aware of the
enjoyment and retains the memory of what has happened. This is
confirmed by the fact that many satisfactions which the desiring
faculty has enjoyed are not retained in the memory: if memory resided
in the desiring faculty, such forgetfulness could not be.
29. Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make
one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance?
Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of
Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold.
[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is not
the faculty that perceives, but some other thing, then the remembering
faculty is twofold.]
And further if the perceptive faculty [= the memory] deals with matters
learned [as well as with matters of observation and feeling] it will be
the faculty for the processes of reason also: but these two orders
certainly require two separate faculties.
Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension [one covering
both sense perceptions and ideas] and assign memory in both orders to
this?
The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for
objects of sense and objects of the Intellectual-Kind; but if these
stand in definite duality, then, for all we can say or do, we are left
with two separate principles of memory; and, supposing each of the two
orders of soul to possess both principles, then we have four.
And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the
principle by which we perceive should be the principle by which we
remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one faculty? Why
must the seat of our intellectual action be also the seat of our
remembrance of that action? The most powerful thought does not always
go with the readiest memory; people of equal perception are not equally
good at remembering; some are especially gifted in perception, others,
never swift to grasp, are strong to retain.
But, once more, admitting two distinct principles, something quite
separate remembering what sense-perception has first known -- still
this something must have felt what it is required to remember?
No; we may well conceive that where there is to be memory of a
sense-perception, this perception becomes a mere presentment, and that
to this image-grasping power, a distinct thing, belongs the memory, the
retention of the object: for in this imaging faculty the perception
culminates; the impression passes away but the vision remains present
to the imagination.
By the fact of harbouring the presentment of an object that has
disappeared, the imagination is, at once, a seat of memory: where the
persistence of the image is brief, the memory is poor; people of
powerful memory are those in whom the image-holding power is firmer,
not easily allowing the record to be jostled out of its grip.
Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory deals
with images. Its differing quality or degree from man to man, we would
explain by difference or similarity in the strength of the individual
powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily conditions present or
absent, producing change and disorder or not -- a point this, however,
which need not detain us here.
30. But what of the memory of mental acts: do these also fall under the
imaging faculty?
If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that
this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how
we remember the object of knowledge once entertained. But if there is
no such necessary image, another solution must be sought. Perhaps
memory would be the reception, into the image-taking faculty, of the
Reason-Principle which accompanies the mental conception: this mental
conception -- an indivisible thing, and one that never rises to the
exterior of the consciousness -- lies unknown below; the
Reason-Principle the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the
image-taking faculty exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the
apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the
enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.
This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon
intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking faculty does its
intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the
perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive
but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us
receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also
sense-perceptions.
31. But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said,
possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there
must be two such faculties. Now that is all very well as long as the
two souls stand apart; but, when they are at one in us, what becomes of
the two faculties, and in which of them is the imaging faculty vested?
If each soul has its own imaging faculty the images must in all cases
be duplicated, since we cannot think that one faculty deals only with
intellectual objects, and the other with objects of sense, a
distinction which inevitably implies the co-existence in man of two
life-principles utterly unrelated.
And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what
difference is there in the souls; and how does the fact escape our
knowledge?
The answer is that, when the two souls chime each with each, the two
imaging faculties no longer stand apart; the union is dominated by the
more powerful of the faculties of the soul, and thus the image
perceived is as one: the less powerful is like a shadow attending upon
the dominant, like a minor light merging into a greater: when they are
in conflict, in discord, the minor is distinctly apart, a self-standing
thing -- though its isolation is not perceived, for the simple reason
that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation.
The two have run into a unity in which, yet, one is the loftier: this
loftier knows all; when it breaks from the union, it retains some of
the experiences of its companion, but dismisses others; thus we accept
the talk of our less valued associates, but, on a change of company, we
remember little from the first set and more from those in whom we
recognize a higher quality.
32. But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all
that the better sort of man may reasonably remember? All these, the one
[the lower man] retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for
the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from
which, however, the best of such impressions pass over to the graver
soul in the degree in which the two are in communication.
The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the
activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is itself
of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are better from
the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher.
The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy
forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower: for one
reason, there is always the possibility that the very excellence of the
lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending to keep it down by sheer
force of vitality. In any case the more urgent the intention towards
the Supreme, the more extensive will be the soul's forgetfulness,
unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that
memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with: in this world itself,
all is best when human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore,
it must be with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that
the good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity; it seeks to
escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it free
from entanglement, light-footed, self-conducted. Thus it is that even
in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting
away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. It
brings there very little of what it has gathered here; as long as it is
in the heavenly regions only, it will have more than it can retain.
The Hercules of the heavenly regions would still tell of his feats: but
there is the other man to whom all of that is trivial; he has been
translated to a holier place; he has won his way to the Intellectual
Realm; he is more than Hercules, proven in the combats in which the
combatants are the wise.
__________________________________________________________________
FOURTH TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (2).
1. What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the
Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence?
Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of
that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is;
failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is not there. Of things
of earth it will know nothing; it will not, for example, remember an
act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had
contemplation of the Supreme.
When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is room for
nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object; and in the
knowing there is not included any previous knowledge; all such
assertion of stage and progress belongs to the lower and is a sign of
the altered; this means that, once purely in the Intellectual, no one
of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further; if all
intellection is timeless -- as appears from the fact that the
Intellectual beings are of eternity not of time -- there can be no
memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things but
none whatever: all is presence There; for nothing passes away, there is
no change from old to new.
This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists in that
realm -- downwards from the Supreme to the Ideas, upward from the Ideas
to the Universal and to the Supreme. Admitting that the Highest, as a
self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the
soul which has attained to the Supreme from exerting its own
characteristic Act: it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages
and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part.
But that would be in the nature of grasping a pure unity?
No: in the nature of grasping all the intellectual facts of a many that
constitutes a unity. For since the object of vision has variety
[distinction within its essential oneness] the intuition must be
multiple and the intuitions various, just as in a face we see at the
one glance eyes and nose and all the rest.
But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and
treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity?
No: there has already been discrimination within the
Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a
reading of this.
First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not
bring time into the soul's intuition of earlier and later among them.
There is a grading by order as well: the ordered disposition of some
growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point, but, to
one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and last than
simply that of the order.
Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is
a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how explain this
grasping first of the unity and later of the rest?
The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such
as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the soul], to
which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one
indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like its
essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple in
virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually
become all things.
For with the Intellectual or Supreme -- considered as distinct from the
One -- there is already the power of harbouring that Principle of
Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its
superior.
2. Enough on that point: we come now to the question of memory of the
personality?
There will not even be memory of the personality; no thought that the
contemplator is the self -- Socrates, for example -- or that it is
Intellect or Soul. In this connection it should be borne in mind that,
in contemplative vision, especially when it is vivid, we are not at the
time aware of our own personality; we are in possession of ourselves
but the activity is towards the object of vision with which the thinker
becomes identified; he has made himself over as matter to be shaped; he
takes ideal form under the action of the vision while remaining,
potentially, himself. This means that he is actively himself when he
has intellection of nothing.
Or, if he is himself [pure and simple], he is empty of all: if, on the
contrary, he is himself [by the self-possession of contemplation] in
such a way as to be identified with what is all, then by the act of
self-intellection he has the simultaneous intellection of all: in such
a case self-intuition by personal activity brings the intellection, not
merely of the self, but also of the total therein embraced; and
similarly the intuition of the total of things brings that of the
personal self as included among all.
But such a process would appear to introduce into the Intellectual that
element of change against which we ourselves have only now been
protesting?
The answer is that, while unchangeable identity is essential to the
Intellectual-Principle, the soul, lying so to speak on the borders of
the Intellectual Realm, is amenable to change; it has, for example, its
inward advance, and obviously anything that attains position near to
something motionless does so by a change directed towards that
unchanging goal and is not itself motionless in the same degree. Nor is
it really change to turn from the self to the constituents of self or
from those constituents to the self; and in this case the contemplator
is the total; the duality has become unity.
None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the
dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own?
No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same
unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it is in
that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the
Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for
by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is
taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the
Intellectual-Principle -- but not to its own destruction: the two are
one, and two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change:
the soul, without motion [but by right of its essential being] would be
intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of
its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with
the Supreme.
3. But it leaves that conjunction; it cannot suffer that unity; it
falls in love with its own powers and possessions, and desires to stand
apart; it leans outward so to speak: then, it appears to acquire a
memory of itself.
In this self-memory a distinction is to be made; the memory dealing
with the Intellectual Realm upbears the soul, not to fall; the memory
of things here bears it downwards to this universe; the intermediate
memory dealing with the heavenly sphere holds it there too; and, in all
its memory, the thing it has in mind it is and grows to; for this
bearing-in-mind must be either intuition [i.e., knowledge with
identity] or representation by image: and the imaging in the case of
the is not a taking in of something but is vision and condition -- so
much so, that, in its very sense -- sight, it is the lower in the
degree in which it penetrates the object. Since its possession of the
total of things is not primal but secondary, it does not become all
things perfectly [in becoming identical with the All in the
Intellectual]; it is of the boundary order, situated between two
regions, and has tendency to both.
4. In that realm it has also vision, through the
Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as
not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and
therefore is no hindrance -- and, indeed, where bodily forms do
intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the
tertiaries.
If, on the contrary, the soul gives itself to the inferior, the same
principle of penetration comes into play, and it possesses itself, by
memory and imagination, of the thing it desired: and hence the memory,
even dealing with the highest, is not the highest. Memory, of course,
must be understood not merely of what might be called the sense of
remembrance, but so as to include a condition induced by the past
experience or vision. There is such a thing as possessing more
powerfully without consciousness than in full knowledge; with full
awareness the possession is of something quite distinct from the self;
unconscious possession runs very close to identity, and any such
approach to identification with the lower means the deeper fall of the
soul.
If the soul, on abandoning its place in the Supreme, revives its
memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them even
there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in
abeyance: they could not be in the nature of impressions permanently
adopted -- a notion which would entail absurdities -- but were no more
than a potentiality realized after return. When that energy of the
Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it sees what it saw in
the earlier state before it revisited the Supreme.
5. But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by
which the Supreme becomes effective in us?
At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere,
memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed
that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed
it: this principle awakens where it wakens; and it alone has vision in
that order; for this is no matter to be brought to us by way of
analogy, or by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere;
the power which, even here, we possess of discoursing upon the
Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which
alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to
speak, and thus attain the vision of the Supreme, as one, standing on
some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have
not mounted with him is invisible.
Memory, by this account, commences after the soul has left the higher
spheres; it is first known in the celestial period.
A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial
and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many
other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said,
it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition
would be natural if the bodies with which those souls are vested in the
celestial must reproduce the former appearance; supposing the spherical
form [of the stars inhabited by souls in the mid-realm] means a change
of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive
quality of personality: this is not fantastic; conditions changing need
not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation,
this too would mean recognition. But those whose descent from the
Intellectual is complete, how is it with them?
They will recall their memories, of the same things, but with less
force than those still in the celestial, since they have had other
experiences to remember, and the lapse of time will have utterly
obliterated much of what was formerly present to them.
But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have
turned to the sense-known kosmos, and are to fall into this sphere of
process?
They need not fall to the ultimate depth: their downward movement may
be checked at some one moment of the way; and as long as they have not
touched the lowest of the region of process [the point at which
non-being begins] there is nothing to prevent them rising once more.
6. Souls that descend, souls that change their state -- these, then,
may be said to have memory, which deals with what has come and gone;
but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to
remain unchanged?
The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the
sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by
audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. The
enquiry entails the examination and identification of acts of
understanding and of reasoning in these beings, if such acts take
place.
Now if, immune from all lack, they neither seek nor doubt, and never
learn, nothing being absent at any time from their knowledge -- what
reasonings, what processes of rational investigation, can take place in
them, what acts of the understanding?
Even as regards human concerns they have no need for observation or
method; their administration of our affairs and of earth's in general
does not go so; the right ordering, which is their gift to the
universe, is effected by methods very different.
In other words, they have seen God and they do not remember?
Ah, no: it is that they see God still and always, and that, as long as
they see, they cannot tell themselves they have had the vision; such
reminiscence is for souls that have lost it.
7. Well but can they not tell themselves that yesterday, or last year,
they moved round the earth, that they lived yesterday or at any given
moment in their lives?
Their living is eternal, and eternity is an unchanging unity. To
identify a yesterday or a last year in their movement would be like
isolating the movement of one of the feet, and finding a this or a that
and an entire series in what is a single act. The movement of the
celestial beings is one movement: it is our measuring that presents us
with many movements, and with distinct days determined by intervening
nights: There all is one day; series has no place; no yesterday, no
last year.
Still: the space traversed is different; there are the various sections
of the Zodiac: why, then, should not the soul say "I have traversed
that section and now I am in this other?" If, also, it looks down over
the concerns of men, must it not see the changes that befall them, that
they are not as they were, and, by that observation, that the beings
and the things concerned were otherwise formerly? And does not that
mean memory?
8. But, we need not record in memory all we see; mere incidental
concomitants need not occupy the imagination; when things vividly
present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete form,
it is not necessary -- unless for purposes of a strictly practical
administration -- to pass over that direct acquaintance, and fasten
upon the partial sense-presentation, which is already known in the
larger knowledge, that of the Universe.
I will take this point by point:
First: it is not essential that everything seen should be laid up in
the mind; for when the object is of no importance, or of no personal
concern, the sensitive faculty, stimulated by the differences in the
objects present to vision, acts without accompaniment of the will, and
is alone in entertaining the impression. The soul does not take into
its deeper recesses such differences as do not meet any of its needs,
or serve any of its purposes. Above all, when the soul's act is
directed towards another order, it must utterly reject the memory of
such things, things over and done with now, and not even taken into
knowledge when they were present.
On the second point: circumstances, purely accidental, need not be
present to the imaging faculty, and if they do so appear they need not
be retained or even observed, and in fact the impression of any such
circumstance does not entail awareness. Thus in local movement, if
there is no particular importance to us in the fact that we pass
through first this and then that portion of air, or that we proceed
from some particular point, we do not take notice, or even know it as
we walk. Similarly, if it were of no importance to us to accomplish any
given journey, mere movement in the air being the main concern, we
would not trouble to ask at what particular point of place we were, or
what distance we had traversed; if we have to observe only the act of
movement and not its duration, nothing to do which obliges us to think
of time, the minutes are not recorded in our minds.
And finally, it is of common knowledge that, when the understanding is
possessed of the entire act undertaken and has no reason to foresee any
departure from the normal, it will no longer observe the detail; in a
process unfailingly repeated without variation, attention to the
unvarying detail is idleness.
So it is with the stars. They pass from point to point, but they move
on their own affairs and not for the sake of traversing the space they
actually cover; the vision of the things that appear on the way, the
journey by, nothing of this is their concern: their passing this or
that is of accident not of essence, and their intention is to greater
objects: moreover each of them journeys, unchangeably, the same
unchanging way; and again, there is no question to them of the time
they spend in any given section of the journey, even supposing time
division to be possible in the case. All this granted, nothing makes it
necessary that they should have any memory of places or times
traversed. Besides this life of the ensouled stars is one identical
thing [since they are one in the All-Soul] so that their very spatial
movement is pivoted upon identity and resolves itself into a movement
not spatial but vital, the movement of a single living being whose act
is directed to itself, a being which to anything outside is at rest,
but is in movement by dint of the inner life it possesses, the eternal
life. Or we may take the comparison of the movement of the heavenly
bodies to a choral dance; if we think of it as a dance which comes to
rest at some given period, the entire dance, accomplished from
beginning to end, will be perfect while at each partial stage it was
imperfect: but if the dance is a thing of eternity, it is in eternal
perfection. And if it is in eternal perfection, it has no points of
time and place at which it will achieve perfection; it will, therefore,
have no concern about attaining to any such points: it will, therefore,
make no measurements of time or place; it will have, therefore, no
memory of time and place.
If the stars live a blessed life in their vision of the life inherent
in their souls, and if, by force of their souls' tendency to become
one, and by the light they cast from themselves upon the entire
heavens, they are like the strings of a lyre which, being struck in
tune, sing a melody in some natural scale . . . if this is the way the
heavens, as one, are moved, and the component parts in their relation
to the whole -- the sidereal system moving as one, and each part in its
own way, to the same purpose, though each, too, hold its own place --
then our doctrine is all the more surely established; the life of the
heavenly bodies is the more clearly an unbroken unity.
9. But Zeus -- ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor
for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into
being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come,
administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the
kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished -- would it not seem
inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have
memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities?
Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be,
must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief
in producing?
Even this matter of Zeus' memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it
is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their
number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in
time [which is not so]; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know
the number of his works.
The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue
of one life for ever: it is in this sense that the All is unlimited,
and thus Zeus' knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from
outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge, for this
unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself -- or, to be
more accurate, eternally follows upon him -- and is seen by an
indwelling knowledge; Zeus knows his own unlimited life, and, in that
knowledge knows the activity that flows from him to the kosmos; but he
knows it in its unity not in its process.
10. The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to
us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the
appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the
principle conducting the universe.
When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must
leave out all notions of stage and progress, and recognize one
unchanging and timeless life.
But the life in the kosmos, the life which carries the leading
principle of the universe, still needs elucidation; does it operate
without calculation, without searching into what ought to be done?
Yes: for what must be stands shaped before the kosmos, and is ordered
without any setting in order: the ordered things are merely the things
that come to be; and the principle that brings them into being is Order
itself; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably
established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. It is an
unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul
which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away
from it -- and in doubt because it has turned away -- but an
unremitting soul performing an unvarying task.
The leading principle of the universe is a unity -- and one that is
sovereign without break, not sometimes dominant and sometimes
dominated. What source is there for any such multiplicity of leading
principles as might result in contest and hesitation? And this
governing unity must always desire the one thing: what could bring it
to wish now for this and now for that, to its own greater perplexing?
But observe: no perplexity need follow upon any development of this
soul essentially a unity. The All stands a multiple thing no doubt,
having parts, and parts dashing with parts, but that does not imply
that it need be in doubt as to its conduct: that soul does not take its
essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals; it
has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it
flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains
one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. To suppose it pursuing
one new object after another is to raise the question whence that
novelty comes into being; the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to
its action; its very work, the kosmos, would be the less well done by
reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail.
11. The administration of the kosmos is to be thought of as that of a
living unit: there is the action determined by what is external, and
has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal
and by the principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals
and on the parts directly affected will often be baffled and obliged to
all sorts of calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of
principle and need no deliberation. And in so far as the kosmos is a
conducted thing, its administration and its administrator will follow
not the way of the doctor but the way of Nature.
And in the case of the universe, the administration is all the less
complicated from the fact that the soul actually circumscribes, as
parts of a living unity, all the members which it conducts. For all the
Kinds included in the universe are dominated by one Kind, upon which
they follow, fitted into it, developing from it, growing out of it,
just as the Kind manifested in the bough is related to the Kind in the
tree as a whole.
What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what place
for memory, where wisdom and knowledge are eternal, unfailingly
present, effective, dominant, administering in an identical process?
The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not
warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to corresponding
variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more
certain the unchanging identity of the producer: even in the single
animal the events produced by Nature are many and not simultaneous;
there are the periods, the developments at fixed epochs -- horns,
beard, maturing breasts, the acme of life, procreation -- but the
principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not
thereby annulled; there is process of growth, but no diversity in the
initial principle. The identity underlying all the multiplicity is
confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent is
exhibited unchanged, undiminished, in the offspring. We have reason,
then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops both, and that
this is the unalterable wisdom of the kosmos taken as a whole; it is
manifold, diverse and yet simplex, presiding over the most
comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise altered within itself by
this multiplicity, but stably one Reason-Principle, the concentrated
totality of things: if it were not thus all things, it would be a
wisdom of the later and partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme.
12. It may be urged that all the multiplicity and development are the
work of Nature, but that, since there is wisdom within the All, there
must be also, by the side of such natural operation, acts of reasoning
and of memory.
But this is simply a human error which assumes wisdom to be what in
fact is unwisdom, taking the search for wisdom to be wisdom itself. For
what can reasoning be but a struggle, the effort to discover the wise
course, to attain the principle which is true and derives from
real-being? To reason is like playing the cithara for the sake of
achieving the art, like practising with a view to mastery, like any
learning that aims at knowing. What reasoners seek, the wise hold:
wisdom, in a word, is a condition in a being that possesses repose.
Think what happens when one has accomplished the reasoning process: as
soon as we have discovered the right course, we cease to reason: we
rest because we have come to wisdom. If then we are to range the
leading principle of the All among learners, we must allow it
reasonings, perplexities and those acts of memory which link the past
with the present and the future: if it is to be considered as a knower,
then the wisdom within it consists in a rest possessing the object
[absolved, therefore, from search and from remembrance].
Again, if the leading principle of the universe knows the future as it
must -- then obviously it will know by what means that future is to
come about; given this knowledge, what further need is there of its
reasoning towards it, or confronting past with present? And, of course,
this knowledge of things to come -- admitting it to exist -- is not
like that of the diviners; it is that of the actual causing principles
holding the certainty that the thing will exist, the certainty inherent
in the all-disposers, above perplexity and hesitancy; the notion is
constituent and therefore unvarying. The knowledge of future things is,
in a word, identical with that of the present; it is a knowledge in
repose and thus a knowledge transcending the processes of cogitation.
If the leading principle of the universe does not know the future which
it is of itself to produce, it cannot produce with knowledge or to
purpose; it will produce just what happens to come, that is to say by
haphazard. As this cannot be, it must create by some stable principle;
its creations, therefore, will be shaped in the model stored up in
itself; there can be no varying, for, if there were, there could also
be failure.
The produced universe will contain difference, but its diversities
spring not from its own action but from its obedience to superior
principles which, again, spring from the creating power, so that all is
guided by Reason-Principles in their series; thus the creating power is
in no sense subjected to experimenting, to perplexity, to that
preoccupation which to some minds makes the administration of the All
seem a task of difficulty. Preoccupation would obviously imply the
undertaking of alien tasks, some business -- that would mean -- not
completely within the powers; but where the power is sovereign and
sole, it need take thought of nothing but itself and its own will,
which means its own wisdom, since in such a being the will is wisdom.
Here, then, creating makes no demand, since the wisdom that goes to it
is not sought elsewhere, but is the creator's very self, drawing on
nothing outside -- not, therefore, on reasoning or on memory, which are
handlings of the external.
13. But what is the difference between the Wisdom thus conducting the
universe and the principle known as Nature?
This Wisdom is a first [within the All-Soul] while Nature is a last:
for Nature is an image of that Wisdom, and, as a last in the soul,
possesses only the last of the Reason-Principle: we may imagine a thick
waxen seal, in which the imprint has penetrated to the very uttermost
film so as to show on both sides, sharp cut on the upper surface, faint
on the under. Nature, thus, does not know, it merely produces: what it
holds it passes, automatically, to its next; and this transmission to
the corporeal and material constitutes its making power: it acts as a
thing warmed, communicating to what lies in next contact to it the
principle of which it is the vehicle so as to make that also warm in
some less degree.
Nature, being thus a mere communicator, does not possess even the
imaging act. There is [within the Soul] intellection, superior to
imagination; and there is imagination standing midway between that
intellection and the impression of which alone Nature is capable. For
Nature has no perception or consciousness of anything; imagination [the
imaging faculty] has consciousness of the external, for it enables that
which entertains the image to have knowledge of the experience
encountered, while Nature's function is to engender -- of itself though
in an act derived from the active principle [of the soul].
Thus the Intellectual-Principle possesses: the Soul of the All
eternally receives from it; this is the soul's life; its consciousness
is its intellection of what is thus eternally present to it; what
proceeds from it into Matter and is manifested there is Nature, with
which -- or even a little before it -- the series of real being comes
to an end, for all in this order are the ultimates of the intellectual
order and the beginnings of the imitative.
There is also the decided difference that Nature operates toward soul,
and receives from it: soul, near to Nature but superior, operates
towards Nature but without receiving in turn; and there is the still
higher phase [the purely Intellectual] with no action whatever upon
body or upon Matter.
14. Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental
materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and
vegetable forms stand to it?
Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them?
Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for light and air
remain each itself, never coalescing: is this the relation of Nature to
the formed object?
It is rather that existing between fire and the object it has warmed:
the fire withdrawn, there remains a certain warmth, distinct from that
in the fire, a property, so to speak, of the object warmed. For the
shape which Nature imparts to what it has moulded must be recognized as
a form quite distinct from Nature itself, though it remains a question
to be examined whether besides this [specific] form there is also an
intermediary, a link connecting it with Nature, the general principle.
The difference between Nature and the Wisdom described as dwelling in
the All has been sufficiently dealt with.
15. But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement:
Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the
soul -- for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity
of the soul, and springs from soul -- and, since time is a thing of
division and comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing
it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that
past must imply that even the All-Soul has memory? We repeat, identity
belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity; otherwise
there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the
activities of the soul can themselves experience change.
Can we escape by the theory that, while human souls -- receptive of
change, even to the change of imperfection and lack -- are in time, yet
the Soul of the All, as the author of time, is itself timeless? But if
it is not in time, what causes it to engender time rather than
eternity?
The answer must be that the realm it engenders is not that of eternal
things but a realm of things enveloped in time: it is just as the souls
[under, or included in, the All-Soul] are not in time, but some of
their experiences and productions are. For a soul is eternal, and is
before time; and what is in time is of a lower order than time itself:
time is folded around what is in time exactly as -- we read -- it is
folded about what is in place and in number.
16. But if in the soul thing follows thing, if there is earlier and
later in its productions, if it engenders or creates in time, then it
must be looking towards the future; and if towards the future, then
towards the past as well?
No: prior and past are in the things its produces; in itself nothing is
past; all, as we have said, is one simultaneous grouping of
Reason-Principles. In the engendered, dissimilarity is not compatible
with unity, though in the Reason-Principles supporting the engendered
such unity of dissimilars does occur -- hand and foot are in unity in
the Reason-Principle [of man], but apart in the realm of sense. Of
course, even in that ideal realm there is apartness, but in a
characteristic mode, just as in a mode, there is priority.
Now, apartness may be explained as simply differentiation: but how
account for priority unless on the assumption of some ordering
principle arranging from above, and in that disposal necessarily
affirming a serial order?
There must be such a principle, or all would exist simultaneously; but
the indicated conclusion does not follow unless order and ordering
principle are distinct; if the ordering principle is Primal Order,
there is no such affirmation of series; there is simply making, the
making of this thing after that thing. The affirmation would imply that
the ordering principle looks away towards Order and therefore is not,
itself, Order.
But how are Order and this orderer one and the same?
Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is
soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the
Intellectual-Principle: and because the succession is a fact of the
things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity.
The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in
complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it
still, an outspreading without interval.
The total scheme may be summarized in the illustration of The Good as a
centre, the Intellectual-Principle as an unmoving circle, the Soul as a
circle in motion, its moving being its aspiration: the
Intellectual-Principle possesses and has ever embraced that which is
beyond being; the soul must seek it still: the sphere of the universe,
by its possession of the soul thus aspirant, is moved to the aspiration
which falls within its own nature; this is no more than such power as
body may have, the mode of pursuit possible where the object pursued is
debarred from entrance; it is the motion of coiling about, with
ceaseless return upon the same path -- in other words, it is circuit.
17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of
the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but
that here the later of order is converted into a later of time --
bringing in all these doubts?
Is it because in us the governing and the answering principles are many
and there is no sovereign unity?
That condition; and, further, the fact that our mental acts fall into a
series according to the succession of our needs, being not
self-determined but guided by the variations of the external: thus the
will changes to meet every incident as each fresh need arises and as
the external impinges in its successive things and events.
A variety of governing principles must mean variety in the images
formed upon the representative faculty, images not issuing from one
internal centre, but, by difference of origin and of acting -- point,
strange to each other, and so bringing compulsion to bear upon the
movements and efficiencies of the self.
When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the
object -- a sort of sensation, in announcement and in picture, of the
experience -- calling us to follow and to attain: the personality,
whether it resists or follows and procures, is necessarily thrown out
of equilibrium. The same disturbance is caused by passion urging
revenge and by the needs of the body; every other sensation or
experience effects its own change upon our mental attitude; then there
is the ignorance of what is good and the indecision of a soul [a human
soul] thus pulled in every direction; and, again, the interaction of
all these perplexities gives rise to yet others.
But do variations of judgement affect that very highest in us?
No: the doubt and the change of standard are of the Conjoint [of the
soul-phase in contact with body]; still, the right reason of that
highest is weaker by being given over to inhabit this mingled mass: not
that it sinks in its own nature: it is much as amid the tumult of a
public meeting the best adviser speaks but fails to dominate; assent
goes to the roughest of the brawlers and roarers, while the man of good
counsel sits silent, ineffectual, overwhelmed by the uproar of his
inferiors.
The lowest human type exhibits the baser nature; the man is a compost
calling to mind inferior political organization: in the mid-type we
have a citizenship in which some better section sways a demotic
constitution not out of control: in the superior type the life is
aristocratic; it is the career of one emancipated from what is a base
in humanity and tractable to the better; in the finest type, where the
man has brought himself to detachment, the ruler is one only, and from
this master principle order is imposed upon the rest, so that we may
think of a municipality in two sections, the superior city and, kept in
hand by it, the city of the lower elements.
18. There remains the question whether the body possesses any force of
its own -- so that, with the incoming of the soul, it lives in some
individuality -- or whether all it has is this Nature we have been
speaking of, the superior principle which enters into relations with
it.
Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in
itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air
traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the body holding
animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is
body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures
which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to
produce knowledge without emotion. By "us, the true human being" I mean
the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien
but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason:
"attached," for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is
an accessory and dependent of the human being; "we" means the
master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an "ours";
and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in
proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than
working towards detachment.
The other, the most honourable phase of our being, is what we think of
as the true man and into this we are penetrating.
Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the soul
alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary between
soul and body and made up of both. A unity is independent: thus body
alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt -- in its dissolution there
is no damage to the body, but merely to its unity -- and soul in
similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very
nature is immune from evil.
But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity, there
is a probable source of pain to them in the mere fact that they were
inapt to partnership. This does not, of course, refer to two bodies;
that is a question of one nature; and I am speaking of two natures.
When one distinct nature seeks to associate itself with another, a
different, order of being -- the lower participating in the higher, but
unable to take more than a faint trace of it -- then the essential
duality becomes also a unity, but a unity standing midway between what
the lower was and what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled
unity; the association is artificial and uncertain, inclining now to
this side and now to that in ceaseless vacillation; and the total
hovers between high and low, telling, downward bent, of misery but,
directed to the above, of longing for unison.
19. Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is
our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul;
pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the
soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful
experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it
belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the
living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the
imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body
feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an
amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the
material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it
is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain [non-material]
conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain
is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think
of as proximity.
And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at every
point of its being, and is thereby enabled to assign every condition to
the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs. Being present as a
whole at every point of the body, if it were itself affected the pain
would take it at every point, and it would suffer as one entire being,
so that it could not know, or make known, the spot affected; it could
say only that at the place of its presence there existed pain -- and
the place of its presence is the entire human being. As things are,
when the finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is
in pain; we class him as suffering, from his finger being painful, just
as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue.
But the pain itself is in the part affected unless we include in the
notion of pain the sensation following upon it, in which case we are
saying only that distress implies the perception of distress. But [this
does not mean that the soul is affected] we cannot describe the
perception itself as distress; it is the knowledge of the distress and,
being knowledge, is not itself affected, or it could not know and
convey a true message: a messenger, affected, overwhelmed by the event,
would either not convey the message or not convey it faithfully.
20. As with bodily pain and pleasure so with the bodily desires; their
origin, also, must be attributed to what thus stands midway, to that
Nature we described as the corporeal.
Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and
purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter: all this
must belong to what is specifically body but chooses to be something
else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the
soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects,
to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or
warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained
untouched by life.
In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows
the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is
causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily
affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction.
Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the
sensation [the sensitive phase of the soul] and in the next lower
phase, that described as the "Nature" which carries the imprint of the
soul to the body; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is
the culmination of the less formed desire in body; sensation knows the
image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the
sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes
procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and
paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that
which subsequently entertained it.
But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the body as a
determined entity [the living total] be the sole desirer?
Because there are [in man] two distinct things, this Nature and the
body, which, through it, becomes a living being: the Nature precedes
the determined body which is its creation, made and shaped by it; it
cannot originate the desires; they must belong to the living body
meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in its distress to
alter its state, to substitute pleasure for pain, sufficiency for want:
this Nature must be like a mother reading the wishes of a suffering
child, and seeking to set it right and to bring it back to herself; in
her search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to
the sufferer's desire and makes the child's experience her own.
In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a
fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and
because of, that living body; granting or withholding belongs to
another again, the higher soul.
21. That this is the phase of the human being in which desire takes its
origin is shown by observation of the different stages of life; in
childhood, youth, maturity, the bodily desires differ; health or
sickness also may change them, while the [psychic] faculty is of course
the same through all: the evidence is clear that the variety of desire
in the human being results from the fact that he is a corporeal entity,
a living body subject to every sort of vicissitude.
The total movement of desire is not always stirred simultaneously with
what we call the impulses to the satisfaction even of the lasting
bodily demands; it may refuse assent to the idea of eating or drinking
until reason gives the word: this shows us desire -- the degree of it
existing in the living body -- advancing towards some object, with
Nature [the lower soul-phase] refusing its co-operation and approval,
and as sole arbiter between what is naturally fit and unfit, rejecting
what does not accord with the natural need.
We may be told that the changing state of the body is sufficient
explanation of the changing desires in the faculty; but that would
require the demonstration that the changing condition of a given entity
could effect a change of desire in another, in one which cannot itself
gain by the gratification; for it is not the desiring faculty that
profits by food, liquid, warmth, movement, or by any relief from
overplenty or any filling of a void; all such services touch the body
only.
22. And as regards vegetal forms? Are we to imagine beneath the leading
principle [the "Nature" phase] some sort of corporeal echo of it,
something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them?
Or are we to think that, while the earth [which nourishes them]
contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the
vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire?
The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth.
Is it one coming from the sphere of the All, a radiation upon earth
from that which Plato seems to represent as the only thing possessing
soul primarily? Or are we to go by that other passage where he
describes earth as the first and oldest of all the gods within the
scope of the heavens, and assigns to it, as to the other stars, a soul
peculiar to itself?
It is difficult to see how earth could be a god if it did not possess a
soul thus distinct: but the whole matter is obscure since Plato's
statements increase or at least do not lessen the perplexity. It is
best to begin by facing the question as a matter of reasoned
investigation.
That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the
vegetation upon it. But we see also that it produces animals; why then
should we not argue that it is itself animated? And, animated, no small
part of the All, must it not be plausible to assert that it possesses
an Intellectual-Principle by which it holds its rank as a god? If this
is true of every one of the stars, why should it not be so of the
earth, a living part of the living All? We cannot think of it as
sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one
appropriate to itself.
Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul, and the earthly
globe not? The stars are equally corporeal, and they lack the flesh,
blood, muscle, and pliant material of earth, which, besides, is of more
varied content and includes every form of body. If the earth's
immobility is urged in objection, the answer is that this refers only
to spatial movement.
But how can perception and sensation [implied in ensoulment] be
supposed to occur in the earth?
How do they occur in the stars? Feeling does not belong to fleshy
matter: soul to have perception does not require body; body, on the
contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its efficiency,
judgement [the foundation of perception] belongs to the soul which
overlooks the body, and, from what is experienced there, forms its
decisions.
But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the
earth, upon which the earth-soul is thus to form its decisions:
certainly vegetal forms, in so far as they belong to earth have no
sensation or perception: in what then, and through what, does such
sensation take place, for sensation without organs is too rash a
notion. Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul? It
could not be necessary to knowledge: surely the consciousness of wisdom
suffices to beings which have nothing to gain from sensation?
This argument is not to be accepted: it ignores the consideration that,
apart from all question of practical utility, objects of sense provide
occasion for a knowing which brings pleasure: thus we ourselves take
delight in looking upon sun, stars, sky, landscape, for their own sake.
But we will deal with this point later: for the present we ask whether
the earth has perceptions and sensations, and if so through what vital
members these would take place and by what method: this requires us to
examine certain difficulties, and above all to decide whether earth
could have sensation without organs, and whether this would be directed
to some necessary purpose even when incidentally it might bring other
results as well.
23. A first principle is that the knowing of sensible objects is an act
of the soul, or of the living conjoint, becoming aware of the quality
of certain corporeal entities, and appropriating the ideas present in
them.
This apprehension must belong either to the soul isolated, self-acting,
or to soul in conjunction with some other entity.
Isolated, self-acting, how is it possible? Self-acting, it has
knowledge of its own content, and this is not perception but
intellection: if it is also to know things outside itself it can grasp
them only in one of two ways: either it must assimilate itself to the
external objects, or it must enter into relations with something that
has been so assimilated.
Now as long as it remains self-centred it cannot assimilate: a single
point cannot assimilate itself to an external line: even line cannot
adapt itself to line in another order, line of the intellectual to line
of the sensible, just as fire of the intellectual and man of the
intellectual remain distinct from fire and man of the sensible. Even
Nature, the soul-phase which brings man into being, does not come to
identity with the man it shapes and informs: it has the faculty of
dealing with the sensible, but it remains isolated, and, its task done,
ignores all but the intellectual as it is itself ignored by the
sensible and utterly without means of grasping it.
Suppose something visible lying at a distance: the soul sees it; now,
admitting to the full that at first only the pure idea of the thing is
seized -- a total without discerned part -- yet in the end it becomes
to the seeing soul an object whose complete detail of colour and form
is known: this shows that there is something more here than the
outlying thing and the soul; for the soul is immune from experience;
there must be a third, something not thus exempt; and it is this
intermediate that accepts the impressions of shape and the like.
This intermediate must be able to assume the modifications of the
material object so as to be an exact reproduction of its states, and it
must be of the one elemental-stuff: it, thus, will exhibit the
condition which the higher principle is to perceive; and the condition
must be such as to preserve something of the originating object, and
yet not be identical with it: the essential vehicle of knowledge is an
intermediary which, as it stands between the soul and the originating
object, will, similarly, present a condition midway between the two
spheres, of sense and the intellectual-linking the extremes, receiving
from one side to exhibit to the other, in virtue of being able to
assimilate itself to each. As an instrument by which something is to
receive knowledge, it cannot be identical with either the knower or the
known: but it must be apt to likeness with both -- akin to the external
object by its power of being affected, and to the internal, the knower,
by the fact that the modification it takes becomes an idea.
If this theory of ours is sound, bodily organs are necessary to
sense-perception, as is further indicated by the reflection that the
soul entirely freed of body can apprehend nothing in the order of
sense.
The organ must be either the body entire or some member set apart for a
particular function; thus touch for one, vision for another. The tools
of craftsmanship will be seen to be intermediaries between the judging
worker and the judged object, disclosing to the experimenter the
particular character of the matter under investigation: thus a ruler,
representing at once the straightness which is in the mind and the
straightness of a plank, is used as an intermediary by which the
operator proves his work.
Some questions of detail remain for consideration elsewhere: Is it
necessary that the object upon which judgement or perception is to take
place should be in contact with the organ of perception, or can the
process occur across space upon an object at a distance? Thus, is the
heat of a fire really at a distance from the flesh it warms, the
intermediate space remaining unmodified; is it possible to see colour
over a sheer blank intervening between the colour and the eye, the
organ of vision reaching to its object by its own power?
For the moment we have one certainty, that perception of things of
sense belongs to the embodied soul and takes place through the body.
24. The next question is whether perception is concerned only with
need.
The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with the
body; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the body to
which the sensations are due; it must be something brought about by
association with the body.
Thus either sensation occurs in a soul compelled to follow upon bodily
states -- since every graver bodily experience reaches at last to soul
-- or sensation is a device by which a cause is dealt with before it
becomes so great as actually to injure us or even before it has begun
to make contact.
At this, sense-impressions would aim at utility. They may serve also to
knowledge, but that could be service only to some being not living in
knowledge but stupefied as the result of a disaster, and the victim of
a Lethe calling for constant reminding: they would be useless to any
being free from either need or forgetfulness. This This reflection
enlarges the enquiry: it is no longer a question of earth alone, but of
the whole star-system, all the heavens, the kosmos entire. For it would
follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt from modification,
sense-perception would occur in every part having relation to any other
part: in a whole, however -- having relation only to itself, immune,
universally self-directed and self-possessing -- what perception could
there be?
Granted that the percipient must act through an organ and that this
organ must be different from the object perceived, then the universe,
as an All, can have [no sensation since it has] no organ distinct from
object: it can have self-awareness, as we have; but sense-perception,
the constant attendant of another order, it cannot have.
Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the normal is
the sense of something intruding from without: but besides this, we
have the apprehension of one member by another; why then should not the
All, by means of what is stationary in it, perceive that region of
itself which is in movement, that is to say the earth and the earth's
content?
Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other regions
of the All; what, then, need prevent the All from having, in some
appropriate way, the perception of those changes? In addition to that
self-contemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not
have a seeing power like that of an eye able to announce to the
All-Soul what has passed before it? Even granted that it is entirely
unaffected by its lower, why, still, should it not see like an eye,
ensouled as it is, all lightsome?
Still: "eyes were not necessary to it," we read. If this meant simply
that nothing is left to be seen outside of the All, still there is the
inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent it seeing what
constitutes itself: if the meaning is that such self-vision could serve
to no use, we may think that it has vision not as a main intention for
vision's sake but as a necessary concomitant of its characteristic
nature; it is difficult to conceive why such a body should be incapable
of seeing.
25. But the organ is not the only requisite to vision or to perception
of any kind: there must be a state of the soul inclining it towards the
sphere of sense.
Now it is the soul's character to be ever in the Intellectual sphere,
and even though it were apt to sense-perception, this could not
accompany that intention towards the highest; to ourselves when
absorbed in the Intellectual, vision and the other acts of sense are in
abeyance for the time; and, in general, any special attention blurs
every other. The desire of apprehension from part to part -- a subject
examining itself -- is merely curiosity even in beings of our own
standing, and, unless for some definite purpose, is waste of energy:
and the desire to apprehend something external -- for the sake of a
pleasant sight -- is the sign of suffering or deficiency.
Smelling, tasting flavours [and such animal perceptions] may perhaps be
described as mere accessories, distractions of the soul, while seeing
and hearing would belong to the sun and the other heavenly bodies as
incidentals to their being. This would not be unreasonable if seeing
and hearing are means by which they apply themselves to their function.
But if they so apply themselves, they must have memory; it is
impossible that they should have no remembrance if they are to be
benefactors, their service could not exist without memory.
26. Their knowledge of our prayers is due to what we may call an
enlinking, a determined relation of things fitted into a system; so,
too, the fulfillment of the petitions; in the art of magic all looks to
this enlinkment: prayer and its answer, magic and its success, depend
upon the sympathy of enchained forces.
This seems to oblige us to accord sense-perception to the earth.
But what perception?
Why not, to begin with, that of contact-feeling, the apprehension of
part by part, the apprehension of fire by the rest of the entire mass
in a sensation transmitted upwards to the earth's leading principle? A
corporeal mass [such as that of the earth] may be sluggish but is not
utterly inert. Such perceptions, of course, would not be of trifles,
but of the graver movement of things.
But why even of them?
Because those gravest movements could not possibly remain unknown where
there is an immanent soul.
And there is nothing against the idea that sensation in the earth
exists for the sake of the human interests furthered by the earth. They
would be served by means of the sympathy that has been mentioned;
petitioners would be heard and their prayers met, though in a way not
ours. And the earth, both in its own interest and in that of beings
distinct from itself, might have the experiences of the other senses
also -- for example, smell and taste where, perhaps, the scent of
juices or sap might enter into its care for animal life, as in the
constructing or restoring of their bodily part.
But we need not demand for earth the organs by which we, ourselves,
act: not even all the animals have these; some, without ears perceive
sound.
For sight it would not need eyes -- though if light is indispensable
how can it see?
That the earth contains the principle of growth must be admitted; it is
difficult not to allow in consequence that, since this vegetal
principle is a member of spirit, the earth is primarily of the
spiritual order; and how can we doubt that in a spirit all is lucid?
This becomes all the more evident when we reflect that, besides being
as a spirit lightsome, it is physically illuminated moving in the light
of kosmic revolution.
There is, thus, no longer any absurdity or impossibility in the notion
that the soul in the earth has vision: we must, further, consider that
it is the soul of no mean body; that in fact it is a god since
certainly soul must be everywhere good.
27. If the earth transmits the generative soul to growing things -- or
retains it while allowing a vestige of it to constitute the vegetal
principle in them -- at once the earth is ensouled, as our flesh is,
and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its
bestowing: this phase of the soul is immanent in the body of the
growing thing, and transmits to it that better element by which it
differs from the broken off part no longer a thing of growth but a mere
lump of material.
But does the entire body of the earth similarly receive anything from
the soul?
Yes: for we must recognize that earthly material broken off from the
main body differs from the same remaining continuously attached; thus
stones increase as long as they are embedded, and, from the moment they
are separated, stop at the size attained.
We must conclude, then, that every part and member of the earth carries
its vestige of this principle of growth, an under-phase of that entire
principle which belongs not to this or that member but to the earth as
a whole: next in order is the nature [the soul-phase], concerned with
sensation, this not interfused [like the vegetal principle] but in
contact from above: then the higher soul and the
Intellectual-Principle, constituting together the being known as Hestia
[Earth-Mind] and Demeter [Earth-Soul] -- a nomenclature indicating the
human intuition of these truths, asserted in the attribution of a
divine name and nature.
28. Thus much established, we may return on our path: we have to
discuss the seat of the passionate element in the human being.
Pleasures and pains -- the conditions, that is, not the perception of
them -- and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a
determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life: are we
entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion? Are we to
consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined body or
in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile
necessarily taking condition within a body not dead? Or are we to think
that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct
entity, so we may reason in this case -- the passionate element being
one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or
percipient faculty?
Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal,
pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent desire
for the satisfaction of need are present all over it -- there is
possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may
suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed -- but in
general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting
point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal
principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver
and body -- the seat, because the spring.
But in this other case, of passion, we have to settle what it is, what
form of soul it represents: does it act by communicating a lower phase
of itself to the regions round the heart, or is it set in motion by the
higher soul-phase impinging upon the Conjoint [the animate-total], or
is there, in such conditions no question of soul-phase, but simply
passion itself producing the act or state of [for example] anger?
Evidently the first point for enquiry is what passion is.
Now we all know that we feel anger not only over our own bodily
suffering, but also over the conduct of others, as when some of our
associates act against our right and due, and in general over any
unseemly conduct. It is at once evident that anger implies some subject
capable of sensation and of judgement: and this consideration suffices
to show that the vegetal nature is not its source, that we must look
for its origin elsewhere.
On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states; people in
whom the blood and the bile are intensely active are as quick to anger
as those of cool blood and no bile are slow; animals grow angry though
they pay attention to no outside combinations except where they
recognize physical danger; all this forces us again to place the seat
of anger in the strictly corporeal element, the principle by which the
animal organism is held together. Similarly, that anger or its first
stirring depends upon the condition of the body follows from the
consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than well,
fasting than after food: it would seem that the bile and the blood,
acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions.
Our conclusion [reconciling with these corporeal facts the psychic or
mental element indicated] will identify, first, some suffering in the
body answered by a movement in the blood or in the bile: sensation
ensues and the soul, brought by means of the representative faculty to
partake in the condition of the affected body, is directed towards the
cause of the pain: the reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above
the phase not inbound with body-acts in its own mode when the breach of
order has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of that ready
passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil
disclosed.
Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart
from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of
the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches
finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend
upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by
which the body becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this
principle it was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and
thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states --
churlish and angry under stress of environment -- so that being wronged
itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its
surroundings, and bring them to the same condition.
That this soul-vestige, which determines the movements of passion is of
one essence [con-substantial] with the other is evident from the
consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal pleasures,
especially those that wholly repudiate the body, are the least prone to
anger and to all experiences not rising from reason.
That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present in
trees and yet passion be lacking in them cannot surprise us since they
are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If the occasions of
anger presented themselves where there is no power of sensation there
could be no more than a physical ebullition with something approaching
to resentment [an unconscious reaction]; where sensation exists there
is at once something more; the recognition of wrong and of the
necessary defence carries with it the intentional act.
But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a desiring
faculty and a passionate faculty -- the first identical with the
vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it acting upon the
blood or bile or upon the entire living organism -- such a division
would not give us a true opposition, for the two would stand in the
relation of earlier phase to derivative.
This difficulty is reasonably met by considering that both faculties
are derivatives and making the division apply to them in so far as they
are new productions from a common source; for the division applies to
movements of desire as such, not to the essence from which they rise.
That essence is not, of its own nature, desire; it is, however, the
force which by consolidating itself with the active manifestation
proceeding from it makes the desire a completed thing. And that
derivative which culminates in passion may not unreasonably be thought
of as a vestige-phase lodged about the heart, since the heart is not
the seat of the soul, but merely the centre to that portion of the
blood which is concerned in the movements of passion.
29. But -- keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed by
soul and not merely illuminated by it -- how is it that when the higher
soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital principle?
For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade away
immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case of warmed
objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly hair and nails
still grow on the dead; animals cut to pieces wriggle for a good time
after; these are signs of a life force still indwelling.
Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of the
higher and lower phases: when the sun withdraws there goes with it not
merely the light emanating from it, guided by it, attached to it, but
also at once that light seen upon obliquely situated objects, a light
secondary to the sun's and cast upon things outside of its path
[reflected light showing as colour]; the two are not identical and yet
they disappear together.
But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration?
The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the
corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk
into body.
No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that much is
certain; but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into its source or
is simply no longer in existence.
How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been?
But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as colour
belongs to bodies by the fact that they throw off light, yet when
corruptible bodies are transformed the colour disappears and we no more
ask where the colour of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is.
Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the hands
clenched or spread; the colour is no such accidental but is more like,
for example, sweetness: when a material substance breaks up, the
sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the fragrance of what was
fragrant, may very well not be annihilated, but enter into some other
substance, passing unobserved there because the new habitat is not such
that the entrant qualities now offer anything solid to perception.
May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies that
have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total, made up of
all that is characteristic, disappears?
It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law [of
our own nature], so that what we call qualities do not actually exist
in the substances.
But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon
the composition of the body; it would no longer be the
Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for instance, the
colours of a bird's variegated plumage; these principles would merely
blend and place them, or if they produced them would draw also on the
full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, mainly, of
showing in the formed bodies something very different from what appears
in the heavens.
But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the
bodies remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered, then it
would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body, the light --
both that in immediate contact and any other attached to that -- should
pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going as in the coming.
But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the secondary
phases follow their priors -- the derivatives their sources -- or
whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from its predecessors
and able to stand alone; in a word, whether no part of the soul is
sundered from the total, but all the souls are simultaneously one soul
and many, and, if so, by what mode; this question, however, is treated
elsewhere.
Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of
the soul actually present in the living body: if there is truly a soul,
then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as
soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body,
as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the
case of the vestige of light; we must examine whether life can exist
without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul
living above and acting upon the remote object.
30. We have declared acts of memory unnecessary to the stars, but we
allow them perceptions, hearing as well as seeing; for we said that
prayers to them were heard -- our supplications to the sun, and those,
even, of certain other men to the stars. It has moreover been the
belief that in answer to prayer they accomplish many human wishes, and
this so lightheartedly that they become not merely helpers towards good
but even accomplices in evil. Since this matter lies in our way, it
must be considered, for it carries with it grave difficulties that very
much trouble those who cannot think of divine beings as, thus, authors
or auxiliaries in unseemliness even including the connections of loose
carnality.
In view of all this it is especially necessary to study the question
with which we began, that of memory in the heavenly bodies.
It is obvious that, if they act on our prayers and if this action is
not immediate, but with delay and after long periods of time, they
remember the prayers men address to them. This is something that our
former argument did not concede; though it appeared plausible that, for
their better service of mankind, they might have been endowed with such
a memory as we ascribed to Demeter and Hestia -- or to the latter alone
if only the earth is to be thought of as beneficent to man.
We have, then, to attempt to show: firstly, how acts implying memory in
the heavenly bodies are to be reconciled with our system as
distinguished from those others which allow them memory as a matter of
course; secondly, what vindication of those gods of the heavenly
spheres is possible in the matter of seemingly anomalous acts -- a
question which philosophy cannot ignore -- then too, since the charge
goes so far, we must ask whether credence is to be given to those who
hold that the entire heavenly system can be put under spell by man's
skill and audacity: our discussion will also deal with the
spirit-beings and how they may be thought to minister to these ends --
unless indeed the part played by the Celestials prove to be settled by
the decision upon the first questions.
31. Our problem embraces all act and all experience throughout the
entire kosmos -- whether due to nature, in the current phrase, or
effected by art. The natural proceeds, we must hold, from the All
towards its members and from the members to the All, or from member to
other member: the artificial either remains, as it began, within the
limit of the art -- attaining finality in the artificial product alone
-- or is the expression of an art which calls to its aid natural forces
and agencies, and so sets up act and experience within the sphere of
the natural.
When I speak of the act and experience of the All I mean the total
effect of the entire kosmic circuit upon itself and upon its members:
for by its motion it sets up certain states both within itself and upon
its parts, upon the bodies that move within it and upon all that it
communicates to those other parts of it, the things of our earth.
The action of part upon part is manifest; there are the relations and
operations of the sun, both towards the other spheres and towards the
things of earth; and again relations among elements of the sun itself,
of other heavenly bodies, of earthly things and of things in the other
stars, demand investigation.
As for the arts: Such as look to house building and the like are
exhausted when that object is achieved; there are again those --
medicine, farming, and other serviceable pursuits -- which deal
helpfully with natural products, seeking to bring them to natural
efficiency; and there is a class -- rhetoric, music and every other
method of swaying mind or soul, with their power of modifying for
better or for worse -- and we have to ascertain what these arts come to
and what kind of power lies in them.
On all these points, in so far as they bear on our present purpose, we
must do what we can to work out some approximate explanation.
It is abundantly evident that the Circuit is a cause; it modifies,
firstly, itself and its own content, and undoubtedly also it tells on
the terrestrial, not merely in accordance with bodily conditions but
also by the states of the soul it sets up; and each of its members has
an operation upon the terrestrial and in general upon all the lower.
Whether there is a return action of the lower upon the higher need not
trouble us now: for the moment we are to seek, as far as discussion can
exhibit it, the method by which action takes place; and we do not
challenge the opinions universally or very generally entertained.
We take the question back to the initial act of causation. It cannot be
admitted that either heat or cold and the like what are known as the
primal qualities of the elements -- or any admixture of these
qualities, should be the first causes we are seeking; equally
inacceptable, that while the sun's action is all by heat, there is
another member of the Circuit operating wholly by cold -- incongruous
in the heavens and in a fiery body -- nor can we think of some other
star operating by liquid fire.
Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and
there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these
causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences
-- determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a
reigning heat or cold -- does that give us a reasonable explanation of
envy, jealously, acts of violence? Or, if it does, what, at any rate,
are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle
blood, treasure-trove?
An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from
any corporeal quality that could enter the body and soul of a living
thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of
the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be
held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is
not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs
in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars,
temple-strippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending
themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is
unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing
being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained.
32. If we can trace neither to material agencies [blind elements] nor
to any deliberate intention the influences from without which reach to
us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general,
what cause satisfactory to reason remains?
The secret is: firstly, that this All is one universally comprehensive
living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a
soul, one soul, which extends to all its members in the degree of
participant membership held by each; secondly, that every separate
thing is an integral part of this All by belonging to the total
material fabric -- unrestrictedly a part by bodily membership, while,
in so far as it has also some participation in the All. Soul, it
possesses in that degree spiritual membership as well, perfect where
participation is in the All-Soul alone, partial where there is also a
union with a lower soul.
But, with all this gradation, each several thing is affected by all
else in virtue of the common participation in the All, and to the
degree of its own participation.
This One-All, therefore, is a sympathetic total and stands as one
living being; the far is near; it happens as in one animal with its
separate parts: talon, horn, finger, and any other member are not
continuous and yet are effectively near; intermediate parts feel
nothing, but at a distant point the local experience is known.
Correspondent things not side by side but separated by others placed
between, the sharing of experience by dint of like condition -- this is
enough to ensure that the action of any distant member be transmitted
to its distant fellow. Where all is a living thing summing to a unity
there is nothing so remote in point of place as not to be near by
virtue of a nature which makes of the one living being a sympathetic
organism.
Where there is similarity between a thing affected and the thing
affecting it, the affection is not alien; where the affecting cause is
dissimilar the affection is alien and unpleasant.
Such hurtful action of member upon member within one living being need
not seem surprising: within ourselves, in our own activities, one
constituent can be harmed by another; bile and animal spirit seem to
press and goad other members of the human total: in the vegetal realm
one part hurts another by sucking the moisture from it. And in the All
there is something analogous to bile and animal spirit, as to other
such constituents. For visibly it is not merely one living organism; it
is also a manifold. In virtue of the unity the individual is preserved
by the All: in virtue of the multiplicity of things having various
contacts, difference often brings about mutual hurt; one thing, seeking
its own need, is detrimental to another; what is at once related and
different is seized as food; each thing, following its own natural
path, wrenches from something else what is serviceable to itself, and
destroys or checks in its own interest whatever is becoming a menace to
it: each, occupied with its peculiar function, assists no doubt
anything able to profit by that, but harms or destroys what is too weak
to withstand the onslaught of its action, like fire withering things
round it or greater animals in their march thrusting aside or trampling
under foot the smaller.
The rise of all these forms of being and their modification, whether to
their loss or gain, all goes to the fulfillment of the natural
unhindered life of that one living being: for it was not possible for
the single thing to be as if it stood alone; the final purpose could
not serve to that only end, intent upon the partial: the concern must
be for the whole to which each item is member: things are different
both from each other and in their own stages, therefore cannot be
complete in one unchanging form of life; nor could anything remain
utterly without modification if the All is to be durable; for the
permanence of an All demands varying forms.
33. The Circuit does not go by chance but under the Reason-Principle of
the living whole; therefore there must be a harmony between cause and
caused; there must be some order ranging things to each other's
purpose, or in due relation to each other: every several configuration
within the Circuit must be accompanied by a change in the position and
condition of things subordinate to it, which thus by their varied
rhythmic movement make up one total dance-play.
In our dance-plays there are outside elements contributing to the total
effect -- fluting, singing, and other linked accessories -- and each of
these changes in each new movement: there is no need to dwell on these;
their significance is obvious. But besides this there is the fact that
the limbs of the dancer cannot possibly keep the same positions in
every figure; they adapt themselves to the plan, bending as it
dictates, one lowered, another raised, one active, another resting as
the set pattern changes. The dancer's mind is on his own purpose; his
limbs are submissive to the dance-movement which they accomplish to the
end, so that the connoisseur can explain that this or that figure is
the motive for the lifting, bending, concealment, effacing, of the
various members of the body; and in all this the executant does not
choose the particular motions for their own sake; the whole play of the
entire person dictates the necessary position to each limb and member
as it serves to the plan.
Now this is the mode in which the heavenly beings [the diviner members
of the All] must be held to be causes wherever they have any action,
and, when. they do not act, to indicate.
Or, a better statement: the entire kosmos puts its entire life into
act, moving its major members with its own action and unceasingly
setting them in new positions; by the relations thus established, of
these members to each other and to the whole, and by the different
figures they make together, the minor members in turn are brought under
the system as in the movements of some one living being, so that they
vary according to the relations, positions, configurations: the beings
thus co-ordinated are not the causes; the cause is the coordinating
All; at the same time it is not to be thought of as seeking to do one
thing and actually doing another, for there is nothing external to it
since it is the cause by actually being all: on the one side the
configurations, on the other the inevitable effects of those
configurations upon a living being moving as a unit and, again, upon a
living being [an All] thus by its nature conjoined and concomitant and,
of necessity, at once subject and object to its own activities.
34. For ourselves, while whatever in us belongs to the body of the All
should be yielded to its action, we ought to make sure that we submit
only within limits, realizing that the entire man is not thus bound to
it: intelligent servitors yield a part of themselves to their masters
but in part retain their personality, and are thus less absolutely at
beck and call, as not being slaves, not utterly chattels.
The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be
produced as they are, since the moving bodies are not of equal speed.
Now the movement is guided by a Reason-Principle; the relations of the
living whole are altered in consequence; here in our own realm all that
happens reacts in sympathy to the events of that higher sphere: it
becomes, therefore, advisable to ask whether we are to think of this
realm as following upon the higher by agreement, or to attribute to the
configurations the powers underlying the events, and whether such
powers would be vested in the configurations simply or in the relations
of the particular items.
It will be said that one position of one given thing has by no means an
identical effect -- whether of indication or of causation -- in its
relation to another and still less to any group of others, since each
several being seems to have a natural tendency [or receptivity] of its
own.
The truth is that the configuration of any given group means merely the
relationship of the several parts, and, changing the members, the
relationship remains the same.
But, this being so, the power will belong, not to the positions but to
the beings holding those positions?
To both taken together. For as things change their relations, and as
any one thing changes place, there is a change of power.
But what power? That of causation or of indication?
To this double thing -- the particular configuration of particular
beings -- there accrues often the twofold power, that of causation and
that of indication, but sometimes only that of indication. Thus we are
obliged to attribute powers both to the configuration and to the beings
entering into them. In mime dancers each of the hands has its own
power, and so with all the limbs; the relative positions have much
power; and, for a third power, there is that of the accessories and
concomitants; underlying the action of the performers' limbs, there are
such items as the clutched fingers and the muscles and veins following
suit.
35. But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter
requires a more definite handling. How can there be a difference of
power between one triangular configuration and another?
How can there be the exercise of power from man to man; under what law,
and within what limits?
The difficulty is that we are unable to attribute causation either to
the bodies of the heavenly beings or to their wills: their bodies are
excluded because the product transcends the causative power of body,
their will because it would be unseemly to suppose divine beings to
produce unseemliness.
Let us keep in mind what we have laid down:
The being we are considering is a living unity and, therefore,
necessarily self-sympathetic: it is under a law of reason, and
therefore the unfolding process of its life must be self-accordant:
that life has no haphazard, but knows only harmony and ordinance: all
the groupings follow reason: all single beings within it, all the
members of this living whole in their choral dance are under a rule of
Number.
Holding this in mind we are forced to certain conclusions: in the
expressive act of the All are comprised equally the configurations of
its members and these members themselves, minor as well as major
entering into the configurations. This is the mode of life of the All;
and its powers work together to this end under the Nature in which the
producing agency within the Reason-Principles has brought them into
being. The groupings [within the All] are themselves in the nature of
Reason-Principles since they are the out-spacing of a living-being, its
reason-determined rhythms and conditions, and the entities thus
spaced-out and grouped to pattern are its various members: then again
there are the powers of the living being -- distinct these, too --
which may be considered as parts of it, always excluding deliberate
will which is external to it, not contributory to the nature of the
living All.
The will of any organic thing is one; but the distinct powers which go
to constitute it are far from being one: yet all the several wills look
to the object aimed at by the one will of the whole: for the desire
which the one member entertains for another is a desire within the All:
a part seeks to acquire something outside itself, but that external is
another part of which it feels the need: the anger of a moment of
annoyance is directed to something alien, growth draws on something
outside, all birth and becoming has to do with the external; but all
this external is inevitably something included among fellow members of
the system: through these its limbs and members, the All is bringing
this activity into being while in itself it seeks -- or better,
contemplates -- The Good. Right will, then, the will which stands above
accidental experience, seeks The Good and thus acts to the same end
with it. When men serve another, many of their acts are done under
order, but the good servant is the one whose purpose is in union with
his master's.
In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we
can but believe that though the heavenly body is intent upon the
Supreme yet -- to keep to the sun -- its warming of terrestrial things,
and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own
act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of
Nature. Each of the heavenly bodies, similarly, gives forth a power,
involuntary, by its mere radiation: all things become one entity,
grouped by this diffusion of power, and so bring about wide changes of
condition; thus the very groupings have power since their diversity
produces diverse conditions; that the grouped beings themselves have
also their efficiency is clear since they produce differently according
to the different membership of the groups.
That configuration has power in itself is within our own observation
here. Why else do certain groupments, in contradistinction to others,
terrify at sight though there has been no previous experience of evil
from them? If some men are alarmed by a particular groupment and others
by quite a different one, the reason can be only that the
configurations themselves have efficacy, each upon a certain type -- an
efficacy which cannot fail to reach anything naturally disposed to be
impressed by it, so that in one groupment things attract observation
which in another pass without effect.
If we are told that beauty is the motive of attraction, does not this
mean simply that the power of appeal to this or that mind depends upon
pattern, configuration? How can we allow power to colour and none to
configuration? It is surely untenable that an entity should have
existence and yet have no power to effect: existence carries with it
either acting or answering to action, some beings having action alone,
others both.
At the same time there are powers apart from pattern: and, in things of
our realm, there are many powers dependent not upon heat and cold but
upon forces due to differing properties, forces which have been shaped
to ideal-quality by the action of Reason-Principles and communicate in
the power of Nature: thus the natural properties of stones and the
efficacy of plants produce many astonishing results.
36. The Universe is immensely varied, the container of all the
Reason-Principles and of infinite and diverse efficacies. In man, we
are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied
powers, and so with each separate part of hand and of foot; and there
is no member or organ without its own definite function, some separate
power of its own -- a diversity of which we can have no notion unless
our studies take that direction. What is true of man must be true of
the universe, and much more, since all this order is but a
representation of the higher: it must contain an untellably wonderful
variety of powers, with which, of course, the bodies moving through the
heavens will be most richly endowed.
We cannot think of the universe as a soulless habitation, however vast
and varied, a thing of materials easily told off, kind by kind -- wood
and stone and whatever else there be, all blending into a kosmos: it
must be alert throughout, every member living by its own life, nothing
that can have existence failing to exist within it.
And here we have the solution of the problem, "How an ensouled living
form can include the soulless": for this account allows grades of
living within the whole, grades to some of which we deny life only
because they are not perceptibly self-moved: in the truth, all of these
have a hidden life; and the thing whose life is patent to sense is made
up of things which do not live to sense, but, none the less, confer
upon their resultant total wonderful powers towards living. Man would
never have reached to his actual height if the powers by which he acts
were the completely soulless elements of his being; similarly the All
could not have its huge life unless its every member had a life of its
own; this however does not necessarily imply a deliberate intention;
the All has no need of intention to bring about its acts: it is older
than intention, and therefore its powers have many servitors.
37. We must not rob the universe of any factor in its being. If any of
our theorists of to-day seek to explain the action of fire -- or of any
other such form, thought of as an agent -- they will find themselves in
difficulties unless they recognize the act to be the object's function
in the All, and give a like explanation of other natural forces in
common use.
We do not habitually examine or in any way question the normal: we set
to doubting and working out identifications when we are confronted by
any display of power outside everyday experience: we wonder at a
novelty and we wonder at the customary when anyone brings forward some
single object and explains to our ignorance the efficacy vested in it.
Some such power, not necessarily accompanied by reason, every single
item possesses; for each has been brought into being and into shape
within a universe; each in its kind has partaken of soul through the
medium of the ensouled All, as being embraced by that definitely
constituted thing: each then is a member of an animate being which can
include nothing that is less than a full member [and therefore a sharer
in the total of power] -- though one thing is of mightier efficacy than
another, and, especially members of the heavenly system than the
objects of earth, since they draw upon a purer nature -- and these
powers are widely productive. But productivity does not comport
intention in what appears to be the source of the thing accomplished:
there is efficacy, too, where there is no will: even attention is not
necessary to the communication of power; the very transmission of soul
may proceed without either.
A living being, we know, may spring from another without any intention,
and as without loss so without consciousness in the begetter: in fact
any intention the animal exercised could be a cause of propagation only
on condition of being identical with the animal [i.e., the theory would
make intention a propagative animal, not a mental act?]
And, if intention is unnecessary to the propagation of life, much more
so is attention.
38. Whatever springs automatically from the All out of that distinctive
life of its own, and, in addition to that self-moving activity,
whatever is due to some specific agency -- for example, to prayers,
simple or taking the form of magic incantations -- this entire range of
production is to be referred, not to each such single cause, but to the
nature of the thing produced [i.e., to a certain natural tendency in
the product to exist with its own quality].
All that forwards life or some other useful purpose is to be ascribed
to the transmission characteristic of the All; it is something flowing
from the major of an integral to its minor. Where we think we see the
transmission of some force unfavourable to the production of living
beings, the flaw must be found in the inability of the subject to take
in what would serve it: for what happens does not happen upon a void;
there is always specific form and quality; anything that could be
affected must have an underlying nature definite and characterized. The
inevitable blendings, further, have their constructive effect, every
element adding something contributory to the life. Then again some
influence may come into play at the time when the forces of a
beneficent nature are not acting: the co-ordination of the entire
system of things does not always allow to each several entity
everything that it needs: and further we ourselves add a great deal to
what is transmitted to us.
None the less all entwines into a unity: and there is something
wonderful in the agreement holding among these various things of varied
source, even of sources frankly opposite; the secret lies in a variety
within a unity. When by the standard of the better kind among things of
process anything falls short -- the reluctance of its material
substratum having prevented its perfect shaping under idea -- it may be
thought of as being deficient in that noble element whose absence
brings to shame: the thing is a blend, something due to the high
beings, an alloy from the underlying nature, something added by the
self.
Because all is ever being knit, all brought to culmination in unity,
therefore all events are indicated; but this does not make virtue a
matter of compulsion; its spontaneity is equally inwoven into the
ordered system by the general law that the things of this sphere are
pendant from the higher, that the content of our universe lies in the
hands of the diviner beings in whom our world is participant.
39. We cannot, then, refer all that exists to Reason-Principles
inherent in the seed of things [Spermatic Reasons]; the universe is to
be traced further back, to the more primal forces, to the principles by
which that seed itself takes shape. Such spermatic principles cannot be
the containers of things which arise independently of them, such as
what enters from Matter [the reasonless] into membership of the All, or
what is due to the mere interaction of existences.
No: the Reason-Principle of the universe would be better envisaged as a
wisdom uttering order and law to a state, in full knowledge of what the
citizens will do and why, and in perfect adaptation of law to custom;
thus the code is made to thread its way in and out through all their
conditions and actions with the honour or infamy earned by their
conduct; and all coalesces by a kind of automatism.
The signification which exists is not a first intention; it arises
incidentally by the fact that in a given collocation the members will
tell something of each other: all is unity sprung of unity and
therefore one thing is known by way of another other, a cause in the
light of the caused, the sequent as rising from its precedent, the
compound from the constituents which must make themselves known in the
linked total.
If all this is sound, at once our doubts fall and we need no longer ask
whether the transmission of any evil is due to the gods.
For, in sum: Firstly, intentions are not to be considered as the
operative causes; necessities inherent in the nature of things account
for all that comes from the other realm; it is a matter of the
inevitable relation of parts, and, besides, all is the sequence to the
living existence of a unity. Secondly, there is the large contribution
made by the individual. Thirdly, each several communication, good in
itself, takes another quality in the resultant combination. Fourthly,
the life in the kosmos does not look to the individual but to the
whole. Finally, there is Matter, the underlie, which being given one
thing receives it as something else, and is unable to make the best of
what it takes.
40. But magic spells; how can their efficacy be explained?
By the reigning sympathy and by the fact in Nature that there is an
agreement of like forces and an opposition of unlike, and by the
diversity of those multitudinous powers which converge in the one
living universe.
There is much drawing and spell-binding dependent on no interfering
machination; the true magic is internal to the All, its attractions
and, not less, its repulsions. Here is the primal mage and sorcerer --
discovered by men who thenceforth turn those same ensorcellations and
magic arts upon one another.
Love is given in Nature; the qualities inducing love induce mutual
approach: hence there has arisen an art of magic love-drawing whose
practitioners, by the force of contact implant in others a new
temperament, one favouring union as being informed with love; they knit
soul to soul as they might train two separate trees towards each other.
The magician too draws on these patterns of power, and by ranging
himself also into the pattern is able tranquilly to possess himself of
these forces with whose nature and purpose he has become identified.
Supposing the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations and
invocations would no longer avail to draw up or to call down; but as
things are he operates from no outside standground, he pulls knowing
the pull of everything towards any other thing in the living system.
The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the
operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon
which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns
or tragic sounds -- for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or
wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no
question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the
performers. Similarly with regard to prayers; there is no question of a
will that grants; the powers that answer to incantations do not act by
will; a human being fascinated by a snake has neither perception nor
sensation of what is happening; he knows only after he has been caught,
and his highest mind is never caught. In other words, some influence
falls from the being addressed upon the petitioner -- or upon someone
else -- but that being itself, sun or star, perceives nothing of it
all.
41. The prayer is answered by the mere fact that part and other part
are wrought to one tone like a musical string which, plucked at one
end, vibrates at the other also. Often, too, the sounding of one string
awakens what might pass for a perception in another, the result of
their being in harmony and tuned to one musical scale; now, if the
vibration in a lyre affects another by virtue of the sympathy existing
between them, then certainly in the All -- even though it is
constituted in contraries -- there must be one melodic system; for it
contains its unisons as well, and its entire content, even to those
contraries, is a kinship.
Thus, too, whatever is hurtful to man -- the passionate spirit, for
example, drawn by the medium of the gall into the principle seated in
the liver -- comes with no intention of hurt; it is simply as one
transferring fire to another might innocently burn him: no doubt, since
he actually set the other on fire he is a cause, but only as the
attacking fire itself is a cause, that is by the merely accidental fact
that the person to whom the fire was being brought blundered in taking
it.
42. It follows that, for the purposes which have induced this
discussion, the stars have no need of memory or of any sense of
petitions addressed to them; they give no such voluntary attention to
prayers as some have thought: it is sufficient that, in virtue simply
of the nature of parts and of parts within a whole, something proceeds
from them whether in answer to prayer or without prayer. We have the
analogy of many powers -- as in some one living organism -- which,
independently of plan or as the result of applied method, act without
any collaboration of the will: one member or function is helped or hurt
by another in the mere play of natural forces; and the art of doctor or
magic healer will compel some one centre to purvey something of its own
power to another centre. just so the All: it purveys spontaneously, but
it purveys also under spell; some entity [acting like the healer] is
concerned for a member situated within itself and summons the All
which, then, pours in its gift; it gives to its own part by the natural
law we have cited since the petitioner is no alien to it. Even though
the suppliant be a sinner, the answering need not shock us; sinners
draw from the brooks; and the giver does not know of the gift but
simply gives -- though we must remember that all is one woof and the
giving is always consonant with the order of the universe. There is,
therefore, no necessity by ineluctable law that one who has helped
himself to what lies open to all should receive his deserts then and
there.
In sum, we must hold that the All cannot be affected; its leading
principle remains for ever immune whatsoever happens to its members;
the affection is really present to them, but since nothing existent can
be at strife with the total of existence, no such affection conflicts
with its impassivity.
Thus the stars, in so far as they are parts, can be affected and yet
are immune on various counts; their will, like that of the All, is
untouched, just as their bodies and their characteristic natures are
beyond all reach of harm; if they give by means of their souls, their
souls lose nothing; their bodies remain unchanged or, if there is ebb
or inflow, it is of something going unfelt and coming unawares.
43. And the Proficient [the Sage], how does he stand with regard to
magic and philtre-spells?
In the soul he is immune from magic; his reasoning part cannot be
touched by it, he cannot be perverted. But there is in him the
unreasoning element which comes from the [material] All, and in this he
can be affected, or rather this can be affected in him. Philtre-Love,
however, he will not know, for that would require the consent of the
higher soul to the trouble stiffed in the lower. And, just as the
unreasoning element responds to the call of incantation, so the adept
himself will dissolve those horrible powers by counter-incantations.
Death, disease, any experience within the material sphere, these may
result, yes; for anything that has membership in the All may be
affected by another member, or by the universe of members; but the
essential man is beyond harm.
That the effects of magic should be not instantaneous but developed is
only in accord with Nature's way.
Even the Celestials, the Daimones, are not on their unreasoning side
immune: there is nothing against ascribing acts of memory and
experiences of sense to them, in supposing them to accept the traction
of methods laid up in the natural order, and to give hearing to
petitioners; this is especially true of those of them that are closest
to this sphere, and in the degree of their concern about it.
For everything that looks to another is under spell to that: what we
look to, draws us magically. Only the self-intent go free of magic.
Hence every action has magic as its source, and the entire life of the
practical man is a bewitchment: we move to that only which has wrought
a fascination upon us. This is indicated where we read "for the burgher
of greathearted Erechtheus has a pleasant face [but you should see him
naked; then you would be cautious]." For what conceivably turns a man
to the external? He is drawn, drawn by the arts not of magicians but of
the natural order which administers the deceiving draught and links
this to that, not in local contact but in the fellowship of the
philtre.
44. Contemplation alone stands untouched by magic; no man self-gathered
falls to a spell; for he is one, and that unity is all he perceives, so
that his reason is not beguiled but holds the due course, fashioning
its own career and accomplishing its task.
In the other way of life, it is not the essential man that gives the
impulse; it is not the reason; the unreasoning also acts as a
principle, and this is the first condition of the misfortune. Caring
for children, planning marriage -- everything that works as bait,
taking value by dint of desire -- these all tug obviously: so it is
with our action, sometimes stirred, not reasonably, by a certain
spirited temperament, sometimes as foolishly by greed; political
interests, the siege of office, all betray a forth-summoning lust of
power; action for security springs from fear; action for gain, from
desire; action undertaken for the sake of sheer necessities -- that is,
for supplying the insufficiency of nature -- indicates, manifestly, the
cajoling force of nature to the safeguarding of life.
We may be told that no such magic underlies good action, since, at
that, Contemplation itself, certainly a good action, implies a magic
attraction.
The answer is that there is no magic when actions recognized as good
are performed upon sheer necessity with the recollection that the
veritable good is elsewhere; this is simply knowledge of need; it is
not a bewitchment binding the life to this sphere or to any thing
alien; all is permissible under duress of human nature, and in the
spirit of adaptation to the needs of existence in general -- or even to
the needs of the individual existence, since it certainly seems
reasonable to fit oneself into life rather than to withdraw from it.
When, on the contrary, the agent falls in love with what is good in
those actions, and, cheated by the mere track and trace of the
Authentic Good makes them his own, then, in his pursuit of a lower
good, he is the victim of magic. For all dalliance with what wears the
mask of the authentic, all attraction towards that mere semblance,
tells of a mind misled by the spell of forces pulling towards
unreality.
The sorcery of Nature is at work in this; to pursue the non-good as a
good, drawn in unreasoning impulse by its specious appearance: it is to
be led unknowing down paths unchosen; and what can we call that but
magic.
Alone in immunity from magic is he who, though drawn by the alien parts
of his total being, withholds his assent to their standards of worth,
recognizing the good only where his authentic self sees and knows it,
neither drawn nor pursuing, but tranquilly possessing and so never
charmed away.
45. From this discussion it becomes perfectly clear that the individual
member of the All contributes to that All in the degree of its kind and
condition; thus it acts and is acted upon. In any particular animal
each of the limbs and organs, in the measure of its kind and purpose,
aids the entire being by service performed and counts in rank and
utility: it gives what is in it its gift and takes from its fellows in
the degree of receptive power belonging to its kind; there is something
like a common sensitiveness linking the parts, and in the orders in
which each of the parts is also animate, each will have, in addition to
its rank as part, the very particular functions of a living being.
We have learned, further, something of our human standing; we know that
we too accomplish within the All a work not confined to the activity
and receptivity of body in relation to body; we know that we bring to
it that higher nature of ours, linked as we are by affinities within us
towards the answering affinities outside us; becoming by our soul and
the conditions of our kind thus linked -- or, better, being linked by
Nature -- with our next highest in the celestial or demonic realm, and
thence onwards with those above the Celestials, we cannot fail to
manifest our quality. Still, we are not all able to offer the same
gifts or to accept identically: if we do not possess good, we cannot
bestow it; nor can we ever purvey any good thing to one that has no
power of receiving good. Anyone that adds his evil to the total of
things is known for what he is and, in accordance with his kind, is
pressed down into the evil which he has made his own, and hence, upon
death, goes to whatever region fits his quality -- and all this happens
under the pull of natural forces.
For the good man, the giving and the taking and the changes of state go
quite the other way; the particular tendencies of the nature, we may
put it, transpose the cords [so that we are moved by that only which,
in Plato's metaphor of the puppets, draws towards the best].
Thus this universe of ours is a wonder of power and wisdom, everything
by a noiseless road coming to pass according to a law which none may
elude -- which the base man never conceives though it is leading him,
all unknowingly, to that place in the All where his lot must be cast --
which the just man knows, and, knowing, sets out to the place he must,
understanding, even as he begins the journey, where he is to be housed
at the end, and having the good hope that he will be with gods.
In a living being of small scope the parts vary but slightly, and have
but a faint individual consciousness, and, unless possibly in a few and
for a short time, are not themselves alive. But in a living universe,
of high expanse, where every entity has vast scope and many of the
members have life, there must be wider movement and greater changes. We
see the sun and the moon and the other stars shifting place and course
in an ordered progression. It is therefore within reason that the
souls, also, of the All should have their changes, not retaining
unbrokenly the same quality, but ranged in some analogy with their
action and experience -- some taking rank as head and some as foot in a
disposition consonant with the Universal Being which has its degrees in
better and less good. A soul, which neither chooses the highest that is
here, nor has lent itself to the lowest, is one which has abandoned
another, a purer, place, taking this sphere in free election.
The punishments of wrong-doing are like the treatment of diseased parts
of the body -- here, medicines to knit sundered flesh; there,
amputations; elsewhere, change of environment and condition -- and the
penalties are planned to bring health to the All by settling every
member in the fitting place: and this health of the All requires that
one man be made over anew and another, sick here, be taken hence to
where he shall be weakly no longer.
__________________________________________________________________
FIFTH TRACTATE.
PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (3).
[ALSO ENTITLED "ON SIGHT"].
1. We undertook to discuss the question whether sight is possible in
the absence of any intervening medium, such as air or some other form
of what is known as transparent body: this is the time and place.
It has been explained that seeing and all sense-perception can occur
only through the medium of some bodily substance, since in the absence
of body the soul is utterly absorbed in the Intellectual Sphere.
Sense-perception being the gripping not of the Intellectual but of the
sensible alone, the soul, if it is to form any relationship of
knowledge, or of impression, with objects of sense, must be brought in
some kind of contact with them by means of whatever may bridge the gap.
The knowledge, then, is realized by means of bodily organs: through
these, which [in the embodied soul] are almost of one growth with it,
being at least its continuations, it comes into something like unity
with the alien, since this mutual approach brings about a certain
degree of identity [which is the basis of knowledge].
Admitting, then, that some contact with an object is necessary for
knowing it, the question of a medium falls to the ground in the case of
things identified by any form of touch; but in the case of sight -- we
leave hearing over for the present -- we are still in doubt; is there
need of some bodily substance between the eye and the illumined object?
No: such an intervening material may be a favouring circumstance, but
essentially it adds nothing to seeing power.
Dense bodies, such as clay, actually prevent sight; the less material
the intervening substance is, the more clearly we see; the intervening
substance, then, is a hindrance, or, if not that, at least not a help.
It will be objected that vision implies that whatever intervenes
between seen and seer must first [and progressively] experience the
object and be, as it were, shaped to it; we will be reminded that
[vision is not a direct and single relation between agent and object,
but is the perception of something radiated since] anyone facing to the
object from the side opposite to ourselves sees it equally; we will be
asked to deduce that if all the space intervening between seen and seer
did not carry the impression of the object we could not receive it.
But all the need is met when the impression reaches that which is
adapted to receive it; there is no need for the intervening space to be
impressed. If it is, the impression will be of quite another order: the
rod between the fisher's hand and the torpedo fish is not affected in
the same way as the hand that feels the shock. And yet there too, if
rod and line did not intervene, the hand would not be affected --
though even that may be questioned, since after all the fisherman, we
are told, is numbed if the torpedo merely lies in his net.
The whole matter seems to bring us back to that sympathy of which we
have treated. If a certain thing is of a nature to be sympathetically
affected by another in virtue of some similitude between them, then
anything intervening, not sharing in that similitude, will not be
affected, or at least not similarly. If this be so, anything naturally
disposed to be affected will take the impression more vividly in the
absence of intervening substance, even of some substance capable,
itself, of being affected.
2. If sight depends upon the linking of the light of vision with the
light leading progressively to the illumined object, then, by the very
hypothesis, one intervening substance, the light, is indispensable: but
if the illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an
agent operating certain changes, some such change might very well
impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium; this all the
more, since as things are the intervening substance, which actually
does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of contact with the
eye [and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision].
Those who have made vision a forth-going act [and not an in-coming from
the object] need not postulate an intervening substance -- unless,
indeed, to provide against the ray from the eye failing on its path --
but this is a ray of light and light flies straight. Those who make
vision depend upon resistance are obliged to postulate an intervening
substance.
The champions of the image, with its transit through a void, are
seeking the way of least resistance; but since the entire absence of
intervenient gives a still easier path they will not oppose that
hypothesis.
So, too, those that explain vision by sympathy must recognize that an
intervening substance will be a hindrance as tending to check or block
or enfeeble that sympathy; this theory, especially, requires the
admission that any intervenient, and particularly one of kindred
nature, must blunt the perception by itself absorbing part of the
activity. Apply fire to a body continuous through and through, and no
doubt the core will be less affected than the surface: but where we are
dealing with the sympathetic parts of one living being, there will
scarcely be less sensation because of the intervening substance, or, if
there should be, the degree of sensation will still be proportionate to
the nature of the separate part, with the intervenient acting merely as
a certain limitation; this, though, will not be the case where the
element introduced is of a kind to overleap the bridge.
But this is saying that the sympathetic quality of the universe depends
upon its being one living thing, and that our amenability to experience
depends upon our belonging integrally to that unity; would it not
follow that continuity is a condition of any perception of a remote
object?
The explanation is that continuity and its concomitant, the bridging
substance, come into play because a living being must be a continuous
thing, but that, none the less, the receiving of impression is not an
essentially necessary result of continuity; if it were, everything
would receive such impression from everything else, and if thing is
affected by thing in various separate orders, there can be no further
question of any universal need of intervening substance.
Why it should be especially requisite in the act of seeing would have
to be explained: in general, an object passing through the air does not
affect it beyond dividing it; when a stone falls, the air simply
yields; nor is it reasonable to explain the natural direction of
movement by resistance; to do so would bring us to the absurdity that
resistance accounts for the upward movement of fire, which on the
contrary, overcomes the resistance of the air by its own essentially
quick energy. If we are told that the resistance is brought more
swiftly into play by the very swiftness of the ascending body, that
would be a mere accidental circumstance, not a cause of the upward
motion: in trees the upthrust from the root depends on no such external
propulsion; we, too, in our movements cleave the air and are in no wise
forwarded by its resistance; it simply flows in from behind to fill the
void we make.
If the severance of the air by such bodies leaves it unaffected, why
must there be any severance before the images of sight can reach us?
And, further, once we reject the theory that these images reach us by
way of some outstreaming from the objects seen, there is no reason to
think of the air being affected and passing on to us, in a progression
of impression, what has been impressed upon itself.
If our perception is to depend upon previous impressions made upon the
air, then we have no direct knowledge of the object of vision, but know
it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are aware of
warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the
warmed intervening air. That is a matter of contact; but sight is not
produced by contact: the application of an object to the eye would not
produce sight; what is required is the illumination of the intervening
medium; for the air in itself is a dark substance: If it were not for
this dark substance there would probably be no reason for the existence
of light: the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires
that it be overcome by light. Perhaps also the reason why an object
brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a
double obscuration, its own and that of the air.
3. For the most convincing proof that vision does not depend upon the
transmission of impressions of any kind made upon the air, we have only
to consider that in the darkness of night we can see a fire and the
stars and their very shapes.
No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness
and come to us in linked progression; if the fire thus rayed out its
own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night,
when the very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their light, we can
see the fire of the beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers.
Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to believe
that in these examples the fire [as light] traverses the air, then, in
so far as anything is visible, it must be that dimmed reproduction in
the air, not the fire itself. But if an object can be seen on the other
side of some intervening darkness, much more would it be visible with
nothing intervening.
We may hold one thing certain: the impossibility of vision without an
intervening substance does not depend upon that absence in itself: the
sole reason is that, with the absence, there would be an end to the
sympathy reigning in the living whole and relating the parts to each
other in an existent unity.
Perception of every kind seems to depend on the fact that our universe
is a whole sympathetic to itself: that it is so, appears from the
universal participation in power from member to member, and especially
in remote power.
No doubt it would be worth enquiry -- though we pass it for the present
-- what would take place if there were another kosmos, another living
whole having no contact with this one, and the far ridges of our
heavens had sight: would our sphere see that other as from a mutually
present distance, or could there be no dealing at all from this to
that?
To return; there is a further consideration showing that sight is not
brought about by this alleged modification of the intervenient.
Any modification of the air substance would necessarily be corporeal:
there must be such an impression as is made upon sealing wax. But this
would require that each part of the object of vision be impressed on
some corresponding portion of the intervenient: the intervenient,
however, in actual contact with the eye would be just that portion
whose dimensions the pupil is capable of receiving. But as a matter of
fact the entire object appears before the pupil; and it is seen entire
by all within that air space for a great extent, in front, sideways,
close at hand, from the back, as long as the line of vision is not
blocked. This shows that any given portion of the air contains the
object of vision, in face view so to speak, and, at once, we are
confronted by no merely corporeal phenomena; the facts are explicable
only as depending upon the greater laws, the spiritual, of a living
being one and self-sensitive.
4. But there is the question of the linked light that must relate the
visual organ to its object.
Now, firstly: since the intervening air is not necessary -- unless in
the purely accidental sense that air may be necessary to light -- the
light that acts as intermediate in vision will be unmodified: vision
depends upon no modification whatever. This one intermediate, light,
would seem to be necessary, but, unless light is corporeal, no
intervening body is requisite: and we must remember that intervenient
and borrowed light is essential not to seeing in general but to distant
vision; the question whether light absolutely requires the presence of
air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us:
If, in the act of vision, that linked light becomes ensouled, if the
soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in
its more inward acts such as understanding -- which is what vision
really is -- then the intervening light is not a necessity: the process
of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of the soul
will perceive by the fact of having entered into the light; all that
intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which
the vision ranges.
This brings up the question whether the sight is made active over its
field by the sheer presence of a distance spread before it, or by the
presence of a body of some kind within that distance.
If by the presence of such a body, then there will be vision though
there be no intervenient; if the intervenient is the sole attractive
agent, then we are forced to think of the visible object as being a
Kind utterly without energy, performing no act. But so inactive a body
cannot be: touch tells us that, for it does not merely announce that
something is by and is touched: it is acted upon by the object so that
it reports distinguishing qualities in it, qualities so effective that
even at a distance touch itself would register them but for the
accidental that it demands proximity.
We catch the heat of a fire just as soon as the intervening air does;
no need to wait for it to be warmed: the denser body, in fact, takes in
more warmth than the air has to give; in other words, the air transmits
the heat but is not the source of our warmth.
When on the one side, that of the object, there is the power in any
degree of an outgoing act, and on the other, that of the sight, the
capability of being acted upon, surely the object needs no medium
through which to be effective upon what it is fully equipped to affect:
this would be needing not a help but a hindrance.
Or, again, consider the Dawn: there is no need that the light first
flood the air and then come to us; the event is simultaneous to both:
often, in fact, we see [in the distance] when the light is not as yet
round our eyes at all but very far off, before, that is, the air has
been acted upon: here we have vision without any modified intervenient,
vision before the organ has received the light with which it is to be
linked.
It is difficult to reconcile with this theory the fact of seeing stars
or any fire by night.
If [as by the theory of an intervenient] the percipient mind or soul
remains within itself and needs the light only as one might need a
stick in the hand to touch something at a distance, then the perception
will be a sort of tussle: the light must be conceived as something
thrusting, something aimed at a mark, and similarly, the object,
considered as an illuminated thing, must be conceived to be resistant;
for this is the normal process in the case of contact by the agency of
an intervenient.
Besides, even on this explanation, the mind must have previously been
in contact with the object in the entire absence of intervenient; only
if that has happened could contact through an intervenient bring
knowledge, a knowledge by way of memory, and, even more emphatically,
by way of reasoned comparison [ending in identification]: but this
process of memory and comparison is excluded by the theory of first
knowledge through the agency of a medium.
Finally, we may be told that the impinging light is modified by the
thing to be seen and so becomes able to present something perceptible
before the visual organ; but this simply brings us back to the theory
of an intervenient changed midway by the object, an explanation whose
difficulties we have already indicated.
5. But some doubt arises when we consider the phenomena of hearing.
Perhaps we are to understand the process thus: the air is modified by
the first movement; layer by layer it is successively acted upon by the
object causing the sound: it finally impinges in that modified form
upon the sense, the entire progression being governed by the fact that
all the air from starting point to hearing point is similarly affected.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the intervenient is modified only by the
accident of its midway position, so that, failing any intervenient,
whatsoever sound two bodies in clash might make would impinge without
medium upon our sense?
Still air is necessary; there could be no sound in the absence of the
air set vibrating in the first movement, however different be the case
with the intervenient from that onwards to the perception point.
The air would thus appear to be the dominant in the production of
sound: two bodies would clash without even an incipient sound, but that
the air, struck in their rapid meeting and hurled outward, passes on
the movement successively till it reaches the ears and the sense of
hearing.
But if the determinant is the air, and the impression is simply of
air-movements, what accounts for the differences among voices and other
sounds? The sound of bronze against bronze is different from that of
bronze against some other substance: and so on; the air and its
vibration remain the one thing, yet the difference in sounds is much
more than a matter of greater or less intensity.
If we decide that sound is caused by a percussion upon the air, then
obviously nothing turning upon the distinctive nature of air is in
question: it sounds at a moment in which it is simply a solid body,
until [by its distinctive character] it is sent pulsing outwards: thus
air in itself is not essential to the production of sound; all is done
by clashing solids as they meet and that percussion, reaching the
sense, is the sound. This is shown also by the sounds formed within
living beings not in air but by the friction of parts; for example, the
grinding of teeth and the crunching of bones against each other in the
bending of the body, cases in which the air does not intervene.
But all this may now be left over; we are brought to the same
conclusion as in the case of sight; the phenomena of hearing arise
similarly in a certain co-sensitiveness inherent in a living whole.
6. We return, then, to the question whether there could be light if
there were no air, the sun illuminating corporeal surfaces across an
intermediate void which, as things are, takes the light accidentally by
the mere fact of being in the path. Supposing air to be the cause of
the rest of things being thus affected, the substantial existence of
light is due to the air; light becomes a modification of the air, and
of course if the thing to be modified did not exist neither could be
modification.
The fact is that primarily light is no appanage of air, and does not
depend upon the existence of air: it belongs to every fiery and shining
body, it constitutes even the gleaming surface of certain stones.
Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming,
could it exist in the absence of its container?
There is a distinction to be made: if it is a quality, some quality of
some substance, then light, equally with other qualities, will need a
body in which to lodge: if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising
from something else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there
be no neighbouring body but, if that is possible, a blank void which it
will overleap and so appear on the further side: it is powerful, and
may very well pass over unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall,
nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes
its light; there is no reason why they should draw the light from its
source and speed it onwards.
Light is not an accidental to something else, requiring therefore to be
lodged in a base; nor is it a modification, demanding a base in which
the modification occurs: if this were so, it would vanish when the
object or substance disappeared; but it does not; it strikes onward;
so, too [requiring neither air nor object] it would always have its
movement.
But movement, where?
Is space, pure and simple, all that is necessary?
With unchecked motion of the light outward, the material sun will be
losing its energy, for the light is its expression.
Perhaps; and [from this untenable consequence] we may gather that the
light never was an appanage of anything, but is the expressive Act
proceeding from a base [the sun] but not seeking to enter into a base,
though having some operation upon any base that may be present.
Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when
anything -- the human body, for instance -- comes in its path to be
affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it
to modify: surely this may be true of light, one of the Acts of
whatever luminary source there be [i.e., light, affecting things, may
be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other].
Certainly light is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which
on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that
it is no longer the brilliant reality: as reasonable to talk of some
substance being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter.
If we are told that light is a mode of the air, we answer that this
would necessarily imply that the air itself is changed to produce the
new mode; in other words, its characteristic darkness must change into
non-darkness; but we know that the air maintains its character, in no
wise affected: the modification of a thing is an experience within that
thing itself: light therefore is not a modification of the air, but a
self-existent in whose path the air happens to be present.
On this point we need dwell no longer; but there remains still a
question.
7. Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring: Whether light
finally perishes or simply returns to its source.
If it be a thing requiring to be caught and kept, domiciled within a
recipient, we might think of it finally passing out of existence: if it
be an Act not flowing out and away -- but in circuit, with more of it
within than is in outward progress from the luminary of which it is the
Act -- then it will not cease to exist as long as that centre is in
being. And as the luminary moves, the light will reach new points --
not in virtue of any change of course in or out or around, but simply
because the act of the luminary exists and where there is no impediment
is effective. Even if the distance of the sun from us were far greater
than it is, the light would be continuous all that further way, as long
as nothing checked or blocked it in the interval.
We distinguish two forms of activity; one is gathered within the
luminary and is comparable to the life of the shining body; this is the
vaster and is, as it were, the foundation or wellspring of all the act;
the other lies next to the surface, the outer image of the inner
content, a secondary activity though inseparable from the former. For
every existent has an Act which is in its likeness: as long as the one
exists, so does the other; yet while the original is stationary the
activity reaches forth, in some things over a wide range, in others
less far. There are weak and faint activities, and there are some,
even, that do not appear; but there are also things whose activities
are great and far-going; in the case of these the activity must be
thought of as being lodged, both in the active and powerful source and
in the point at which it settles. This may be observed in the case of
an animal's eyes where the pupils gleam: they have a light which shows
outside the orbs. Again there are living things which have an inner
fire that in darkness shines out when they expand themselves and ceases
to ray outward when they contract: the fire has not perished; it is a
mere matter of it being rayed out or not.
But has the light gone inward?
No: it is simply no longer on the outside because the fire [of which it
is the activity] is no longer outward going but has withdrawn towards
the centre.
But surely the light has gone inward too?
No: only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only
of the non-luminous body; the fire can no longer act towards the outer.
The light, then, raying from bodies is an outgoing activity of a
luminous body; the light within luminous bodies -- understand; such as
are primarily luminous -- is the essential being embraced under the
idea of that body. When such a body is brought into association with
Matter, its activity produces colour: when there is no such
association, it does not give colour -- it gives merely an incipient on
which colour might be formed -- for it belongs to another being [primal
light] with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or
from its [inner] activity.
And light is incorporeal even when it is the light of a body; there is
therefore no question, strictly speaking, of its withdrawal or of its
being present -- these terms do not apply to its modes -- and its
essential existence is to be an activity. As an example: the image upon
a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the reflected
object upon the potential recipient: there is no outgoing from the
object [or ingoing into the reflecting body]; it is simply that, as
long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form
of colour shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not
there, the reflecting surface no longer holds what it held when the
conditions were favourable.
So it is with the soul considered as the activity of another and prior
soul: as long as that prior retains its place, its next, which is its
activity, abides.
But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an
activity -- as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body
to be -- is its presence similar to that of the light caught and held
in material things?
No; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of
the active element [the light being alloyed with Matter]; whereas the
life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul
closely present to it.
But when the body perishes -- by the fact that nothing without part in
soul can continue in being -- when the body is perishing, no longer
supported by that primal life-giving soul, or by the presence of any
secondary phase of it, it is clear that the life-principle can no
longer remain; but does this mean that the life perishes?
No; not even it; for it, too, is an image of that first out-shining; it
is merely no longer where it was.
8. Imagine that beyond the heavenly system there existed some solid
mass, and that from this sphere there was directed to it a vision
utterly unimpeded and unrestricted: it is a question whether that solid
form could be perceived by what has no sympathetic relation with it,
since we have held that sympathetic relation comes about in virtue of
the nature inherent in some one living being.
Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that
percipients and things perceived are all members of one living being,
no acts of perception could take place: that far body could be known
only if it were a member of this living universe of ours -- which
condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if, without being
thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting light and
colour and the qualities by which we perceive things, and belonging to
the same ideal category as the organ of vision?
If our supposition [of perception by sympathy] is true, there would
still be no perception -- though we may be told that the hypothesis is
clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can
fail in grasping an illuminated object lying before it, and that the
other senses in the presence of their particular objects remain
unresponsive.
[The following passage, to nearly the end, is offered tentatively as a
possible help to the interpretation of an obscure and corrupt place.]
[But why does such a failing appear impossible to us? We answer,
because here and now in all the act and experience of our senses, we
are within a unity, and members of it. What the conditions would be
otherwise, remains to be considered: if living sympathy suffices the
theory is established; if not, there are other considerations to
support it.
That every living being is self-sensitive allows of no doubt; if the
universe is a living being, no more need be said; and what is true of
the total must be true of the members, as inbound in that one life.
But what if we are invited to accept the theory of knowledge by
likeness (rejecting knowledge by the self-sensitiveness of a living
unity)?
Awareness must be determined by the nature and character of the living
being in which it occurs; perception, then, means that the likeness
demanded by the hypothesis is within this self-identical living being
(and not in the object) -- for the organ by which the perception takes
place is in the likeness of the living being (is merely the agent
adequately expressing the nature of the living being): thus perception
is reduced to a mental awareness by means of organs akin to the object.
If, then, something that is a living whole perceives not its own
content but things like to its content, it must perceive them under the
conditions of that living whole; this means that, in so far as it has
perception, the objects appear not as its content but as related to its
content.
And the objects are thus perceived as related because the mind itself
has related them in order to make them amenable to its handling: in
other words the causative soul or mind in that other sphere is utterly
alien, and the things there, supposed to be related to the content of
this living whole, can be nothing to our minds.]
This absurdity shows that the hypothesis contains a contradiction which
naturally leads to untenable results. In fact, under one and the same
heading, it presents mind and no mind, it makes things kin and no kin,
it confuses similar and dissimilar: containing these irreconcilable
elements, it amounts to no hypothesis at all. At one and the same
moment it postulates and denies a soul, it tells of an All that is
partial, of a something which is at once distinct and not distinct, of
a nothingness which is no nothingness, of a complete thing that is
incomplete: the hypothesis therefore must be dismissed; no deduction is
possible where a thesis cancels its own propositions.
__________________________________________________________________
SIXTH TRACTATE.
PERCEPTION AND MEMORY.
1. Perceptions are no imprints, we have said, are not to be thought of
as seal-impressions on soul or mind: accepting this statement, there is
one theory of memory which must be definitely rejected.
Memory is not to be explained as the retaining of information in virtue
of the lingering of an impression which in fact was never made; the two
things stand or fall together; either an impression is made upon the
mind and lingers when there is remembrance, or, denying the impression,
we cannot hold that memory is its lingering. Since we reject equally
the impression and the retention we are obliged to seek for another
explanation of perception and memory, one excluding the notions that
the sensible object striking upon soul or mind makes a mark upon it,
and that the retention of this mark is memory.
If we study what occurs in the case of the most vivid form of
perception, we can transfer our results to the other cases, and so
solve our problem.
In any perception we attain by sight, the object is grasped there where
it lies in the direct line of vision; it is there that we attack it;
there, then, the perception is formed; the mind looks outward; this is
ample proof that it has taken and takes no inner imprint, and does not
see in virtue of some mark made upon it like that of the ring on the
wax; it need not look outward at all if, even as it looked, it already
held the image of the object, seeing by virtue of an impression made
upon itself. It includes with the object the interval, for it tells at
what distance the vision takes place: how could it see as outlying an
impression within itself, separated by no interval from itself? Then,
the point of magnitude: how could the mind, on this hypothesis, define
the external size of the object or perceive that it has any -- the
magnitude of the sky, for instance, whose stamped imprint would be too
vast for it to contain? And, most convincing of all, if to see is to
accept imprints of the objects of our vision, we can never see these
objects themselves; we see only vestiges they leave within us, shadows:
the things themselves would be very different from our vision of them.
And, for a conclusive consideration, we cannot see if the living object
is in contact with the eye, we must look from a certain distance; this
must be more applicable to the mind; supposing the mind to be stamped
with an imprint of the object, it could not grasp as an object of
vision what is stamped upon itself. For vision demands a duality, of
seen and seeing: the seeing agent must be distinct and act upon an
impression outside it, not upon one occupying the same point with it:
sight can deal only with an object not inset but outlying.
2. But if perception does not go by impression, what is the process?
The mind affirms something not contained within it: this is precisely
the characteristic of a power -- not to accept impression but, within
its allotted sphere, to act.
Besides, the very condition of the mind being able to exercise
discrimination upon what it is to see and hear is not, of course, that
these objects be equally impressions made upon it; on the contrary,
there must be no impressions, nothing to which the mind is passive;
there can be only acts of that in which the objects become known.
Our tendency is to think of any of the faculties as unable to know its
appropriate object by its own uncompelled act; to us it seems to submit
to its environment rather than simply to perceive it, though in reality
it is the master, not the victim.
As with sight, so with hearing. It is the air which takes the
impression, a kind of articulated stroke which may be compared to
letters traced upon it by the object causing the sound; but it belongs
to the faculty, and the soul-essence, to read the imprints thus
appearing before it, as they reach the point at which they become
matter of its knowledge.
In taste and smell also we distinguish between the impressions received
and the sensations and judgements; these last are mental acts, and
belong to an order apart from the experiences upon which they are
exercised.
The knowing of the things belonging to the Intellectual is not in any
such degree attended by impact or impression: they come forward, on the
contrary, as from within, unlike the sense-objects known as from
without: they have more emphatically the character of acts; they are
acts in the stricter sense, for their origin is in the soul, and every
concept of this Intellectual order is the soul about its Act.
Whether, in this self-vision, the soul is a duality and views itself as
from the outside -- while seeing the Intellectual-Principal as a unity,
and itself with the Intellectual-Principle as a unity -- this question
is investigated elsewhere.
3. With this prologue we come to our discussion of Memory.
That the soul, or mind, having taken no imprint, yet achieves
perception of what it in no way contains need not surprise us; or
rather, surprising though it is, we cannot refuse to believe in this
remarkable power.
The Soul is the Reason-Principle of the universe, ultimate among the
Intellectual Beings -- its own essential Nature is one of the Beings of
the Intellectual Realm -- but it is the primal Reason-Principle of the
entire realm of sense.
Thus it has dealings with both orders -- benefited and quickened by the
one, but by the other beguiled, falling before resemblances, and so led
downwards as under spell. Poised midway, it is aware of both spheres.
Of the Intellectual it is said to have intuition by memory upon
approach, for it knows them by a certain natural identity with them;
its knowledge is not attained by besetting them, so to speak, but by in
a definite degree possessing them; they are its natural vision; they
are itself in a more radiant mode, and it rises from its duller pitch
to that greater brilliance in a sort of awakening, a progress from its
latency to its act.
To the sense-order it stands in a similar nearness and to such things
it gives a radiance out of its own store and, as it were, elaborates
them to visibility: the power is always ripe and, so to say, in travail
towards them, so that, whenever it puts out its strength in the
direction of what has once been present in it, it sees that object as
present still; and the more intent its effort the more durable is the
presence. This is why, it is agreed, children have long memory; the
things presented to them are not constantly withdrawn but remain in
sight; in their case the attention is limited but not scattered: those
whose faculty and mental activity are busied upon a multitude of
subjects pass quickly over all, lingering on none.
Now, if memory were a matter of seal-impressions retained, the
multiplicity of objects would have no weakening effect on the memory.
Further, on the same hypothesis, we would have no need of thinking back
to revive remembrance; nor would we be subject to forgetting and
recalling; all would lie engraved within.
The very fact that we train ourselves to remember shows that what we
get by the process is a strengthening of the mind: just so, exercises
for feet and hands enable us to do easily acts which in no sense
contained or laid up in those members, but to which they may be fitted
by persevering effort.
How else can it be explained that we forget a thing heard once or twice
but remember what is often repeated, and that we recall a long time
afterwards what at first hearing we failed to hold?
It is no answer to say that the parts present themselves sooner than
the entire imprint -- why should they too be forgotten? -- [there is no
question of parts, for] the last hearing, or our effort to remember,
brings the thing back to us in a flash.
All these considerations testify to an evocation of that faculty of the
soul, or mind, in which remembrance is vested: the mind is
strengthened, either generally or to this particular purpose.
Observe these facts: memory follows upon attention; those who have
memorized much, by dint of their training in the use of leading
indications [suggestive words and the like], reach the point of being
easily able to retain without such aid: must we not conclude that the
basis of memory is the soul-power brought to full strength?
The lingering imprints of the other explanation would tell of weakness
rather than power; for to take imprint easily is to be yielding. An
impression is something received passively; the strongest memory, then,
would go with the least active nature. But what happens is the very
reverse: in no pursuit to technical exercises tend to make a man less
the master of his acts and states. It is as with sense-perception; the
advantage is not to the weak, the weak eye for example, but to that
which has the fullest power towards its exercise. In the old, it is
significant, the senses are dulled and so is the memory.
Sensation and memory, then, are not passivity but power.
And, once it is admitted that sensations are not impressions, the
memory of a sensation cannot consist in the retention of an impression
that was never made.
Yes: but if it is an active power of the mind, a fitness towards its
particular purpose, why does it not come at once -- and not with delay
-- to the recollection of its unchanging objects?
Simply because the power needs to be poised and prepared: in this it is
only like all the others, which have to be readied for the task to
which their power reaches, some operating very swiftly, others only
after a certain self-concentration.
Quick memory does not in general go with quick wit: the two do not fall
under the same mental faculty; runner and boxer are not often united in
one person; the dominant idea differs from man to man.
Yet there could be nothing to prevent men of superior faculty from
reading impressions on the mind; why should one thus gifted be
incapable of what would be no more than a passive taking and holding?
That memory is a power of the Soul [not a capacity for taking imprint]
is established at a stroke by the consideration that the soul is
without magnitude.
And -- one general reflection -- it is not extraordinary that
everything concerning soul should proceed in quite other ways than
appears to people who either have never enquired, or have hastily
adopted delusive analogies from the phenomena of sense, and persist in
thinking of perception and remembrance in terms of characters inscribed
on plates or tablets; the impossibilities that beset this theory escape
those that make the soul incorporeal equally with those to whom it is
corporeal.
__________________________________________________________________
SEVENTH TRACTATE.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
1. Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or
whether something of us passes over to dissolution and destruction,
while something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever --
this question will be answered here for those willing to investigate
our nature.
We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and
he has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body: this
is the first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and
essential being of these two constituents.
Reason tells us that the body as, itself too, a composite, cannot for
ever hold together; and our senses show us it breaking up, wearing out,
the victim of destructive agents of many kinds, each of its
constituents going its own way, one part working against another,
perverting, wrecking, and this especially when the material masses are
no longer presided over by the reconciling soul.
And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is still
not a unity; for it is divisible into shape and matter, the duality
without which bodies at their very simplest cannot cohere.
The mere fact that, as material forms, they have bulk means that they
can be lopped and crushed and so come to destruction.
If this body, then, is really a part of us, we are not wholly immortal;
if it is an instrument of ours, then, as a thing put at our service for
a certain time, it must be in its nature passing.
The sovereign principle, the authentic man, will be as Form to this
Matter or as agent to this instrument, and thus, whatever that relation
be, the soul is the man.
2. But of what nature is this sovereign principle?
If material, then definitely it must fall apart; for every material
entity, at least, is something put together.
If it is not material but belongs to some other Kind, that new
substance must be investigated in the same way or by some more suitable
method.
But our first need is to discover into what this material form, since
such the soul is to be, can dissolve.
Now: of necessity life is inherent to soul: this material entity, then,
which we call soul must have life ingrained within it; but [being a
composite as by hypothesis, material] it must be made up of two or more
bodies; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of
those bodies or in one of them to the exclusion of the other or others;
if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere.
If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul.
But what sort of an entity have we there; what is this body which of
its own nature possesses soul?
Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless -- whenever soul is
in any of them, that life is borrowed -- and there are no other forms
of body than these four: even the school that believes there are has
always held them to be bodies, not souls, and to be without life.
None of these, then, having life, it would be extraordinary if life
came about by bringing them together; it is impossible, in fact, that
the collocation of material entities should produce life, or mindless
entities mind.
No one, moreover, would pretend that a mere chance mixing could give
such results: some regulating principle would be necessary, some Cause
directing the admixture: that guiding principle would be -- soul.
Body -- not merely because it is a composite, but even were it simplex
-- could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for body
owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and
only from soul can a Reason-Principle come.
3. Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some
entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the
very unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the
very coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature
repugnant to unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or
self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again,
constituents void of part could never produce body or bulk.
Perhaps we will be asked to consider body as a simple entity
[disregarding the question of any constituent elements]: they will tell
us, then, that no doubt, as purely material, it cannot have a
self-springing life -- since matter is without quality -- but that life
is introduced by the fact that the Matter is brought to order under
Forming-Idea. But if by this Forming-Idea they mean an essential, a
real being, then it is not the conjoint of body and idea that
constitutes soul: it must be one of the two items and that one, being
[by hypothesis] outside of the Matter, cannot be body: to make it body
would simply force us to repeat our former analysis.
If on the contrary they do not mean by this Forming-Idea a real being,
but some condition or modification of the Matter, they must tell us how
and whence this modification, with resultant life, can have found the
way into the Matter: for very certainly Matter does not mould itself to
pattern or bring itself to life.
It becomes clear that since neither Matter nor body in any mode has
this power, life must be brought upon the stage by some directing
principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal.
In fact, body itself could not exist in any form if soul-power did not:
body passes; dissolution is in its very nature; all would disappear in
a twinkling if all were body. It is no help to erect some one mode of
body into soul; made of the same Matter as the rest, this soul body
would fall under the same fate: of course it could never really exist:
the universe of things would halt at the material, failing something to
bring Matter to shape.
Nay more: Matter itself could not exist: the totality of things in this
sphere is dissolved if it be made to depend upon the coherence of a
body which, though elevated to the nominal rank of "soul," remains air,
fleeting breath [the Stoic pneuma, rarefied matter, "spirit" in the
lower sense], whose very unity is not drawn from itself.
All bodies are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the kosmos
be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless
haphazard drift? This pneuma -- orderless except under soul -- how can
it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given soul, all these
material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the
kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate
objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the
things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their
ordered parts.
4. Our opponents themselves are driven by stress of fact to admit the
necessity of a prior to body, a higher thing, some phase or form of
soul; their "pneuma" [finer-body or spirit] is intelligent, and they
speak of an "intellectual fire"; this "fire" and "spirit" they imagine
to be necessary to the existence of the higher order which they
conceive as demanding some base, though the real difficulty, under
their theory, is to find a base for material things whose only possible
base is, precisely, the powers of soul.
Besides, if they make life and soul no more than this "pneuma," what is
the import of that repeated qualification of theirs "in a certain
state," their refuge when they are compelled to recognize some acting
principle apart from body? If not every pneuma is a soul, but thousands
of them soulless, and only the pneuma in this "certain state" is soul,
what follows? Either this "certain state," this shaping or
configuration of things, is a real being or it is nothing.
If it is nothing, only the pneuma exists, the "certain state" being no
more than a word; this leads imperatively to the assertion that Matter
alone exists, Soul and God mere words, the lowest alone is.
If on the contrary this "configuration" is really existent -- something
distinct from the underlie or Matter, something residing in Matter but
itself immaterial as not constructed out of Matter, then it must be a
Reason-Principle, incorporeal, a separate Nature.
There are other equally cogent proofs that the soul cannot be any form
of body.
Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or
white, and so on through all the qualities by which one is different
from another; and, again, if a body is warm it diffuses only warmth, if
cold it can only chill, if light its presence tells against the total
weight which if heavy it increases; black, it darkens; white, it
lightens; fire has not the property of chilling or a cold body that of
warming.
Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings,
and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the
solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy
and light. If it were material, its quality -- and the colour it must
have -- would produce one invariable effect and not the variety
actually observed.
5. Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform; failing an
incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of movement? Predilections,
reasons, they will say; that is all very well, but these already
contain that variety and therefore cannot belong to body which is one
and simplex, and, besides, is not participant in reason -- that is, not
in the sense here meant, but only as it is influenced by some principle
which confers upon it the qualities of, for instance, being warm or
cold.
Then there is growth under a time-law, and within a definite limit: how
can this belong strictly to body? Body can indeed be brought to growth,
but does not itself grow except in the sense that in the material mass
a capacity for growing is included as an accessory to some principle
whose action upon the body causes growth.
Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth, then,
if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it too must grow;
that means it must add to itself a similar bodily material. For the
added material must be either soul or soulless body: if soul, whence
and how does it enter, and by what process is it adjoined [to the soul
which by hypothesis is body]; if soulless, how does such an addition
become soul, falling into accord with its precedent, making one thing
with it, sharing the stored impressions and notions of that initial
soul instead, rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge
laid up before?
Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss and
gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks the rest of
our material mass?
And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition of
familiar things when we have no stably identical soul?
Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body, characteristically
divisible, no one of the parts can be identical with the entire being;
soul, then, is a thing of defined size, and if curtailed must cease to
be what it is; in the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so,
for, if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in
virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and
quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a
quality quite independent of quantity.
What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal? Is
every part of the soul, in any one body, soul entire, soul perfectly
true to its essential being? and may the same be said of every part of
the part? If so, the magnitude makes no contribution to the soul's
essential nature, as it must if soul [as corporeal] were a definite
magnitude: it is, as body cannot be, an "all-everywhere," a complete
identity present at each and every point, the part all that the whole
is.
To deny that every part is soul is to make soul a compound from
soulless elements. Further, if a definite magnitude, the double limit
of larger or smaller, is to be imposed upon each separate soul, then
anything outside those limits is no soul.
Now, a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a twin birth or in
the animal order to a litter; there is a splitting and diverging of the
seed, every diverging part being obviously a whole: surely no honest
mind can fail to gather that a thing in which part is identical with
whole has a nature which transcends quantity, and must of necessity be
without quantity: only so could it remain identical when quantity is
filched from it, only by being indifferent to amount or extension, by
being in essence something apart. Thus the Soul and the
Reason-Principles are without quantity.
6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there
could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral
excellence, nothing of all that is noble.
There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity
enables it to grasp an object as an entirety.
The several senses will each be the entrance point of many diverse
perceptions; in any one object there may be many characteristics; any
one organ may be the channel of a group of objects, as for instance a
face is known not by a special sense for separate features, nose, eyes;
etc., but by one sense observing all in one act.
When sight and hearing gather their varying information, there must be
some central unity to which both report. How could there be any
statement of difference unless all sense-impressions appeared before a
common identity able to take the sum of all?
This there must be, as there is a centre to a circle; the
sense-impressions converging from every point of occurrence will be as
lines striking from a circumference to what will be a true centre of
perception as being a veritable unity.
If this centre were to break into separate points -- so that the
sense-impressions fell upon the two ends of a line -- then, either it
must reknit itself to unity and identity, perhaps at the mid-point of
the line, or all remains unrelated, every end receiving the report of
its particular field exactly as you and I have our distinct sense
experiences.
Suppose the sense-object be such a unity as a face: all the points of
observation must be brought together in one visual total, as is obvious
since there could be no panorama of great expanses unless the detail
were compressed to the capacity of the pupils.
Much more must this be true in the case of thoughts, partless entities
as they are, impinging upon the centre of consciousness which [to
receive them] must itself be void of part.
Either this or, supposing the centre of consciousness to be a thing of
quantity and extension, the sensible object will coincide with it point
by point of their co-expansion so that any given point in the faculty
will perceive solely what coincides with it in the object: and thus
nothing in us could perceive any thing as a whole.
This cannot be: the faculty entire must be a unity; no such dividing is
possible; this is no matter in which we can think of equal sections
coinciding; the centre of consciousness has no such relation of
equality with any sensible object. The only possible ratio of
divisibility would be that of the number of diverse elements in the
impinging sensation: are we then to suppose that each part of the soul,
and every part of each part, will have perception? Or will the part of
the parts have none? That is impossible: every part, then, has
perception; the [hypothetical] magnitude, of soul and each part of
soul, is infinitely divisible; there will therefore be in each part an
infinite number of perceptions of the object, and therefore an
infinitude of representations of it at our centre of consciousness.
If the sentient be a material entity sensation could only be of the
order of seal-impressions struck by a ring on wax, in this case by
sensible objects on the blood or on the intervenient air.
If, at this, the impression is like one made in liquids -- as would be
reasonable -- it will be confused and wavering as upon water, and there
can be no memory. If the impressions are permanent, then either no
fresh ones can be stamped upon the occupied ground -- and there can be
no change of sensations -- or, others being made, the former will be
obliterated; and all record of the past is done away with.
If memory implies fresh sensations imposed upon former ones, the
earlier not barring their way, the soul cannot be a material entity.
7. We come to the same result by examining the sense of pain. We say
there is pain in the finger: the trouble is doubtless in the finger,
but our opponents must admit that the sensation of the pain is in the
centre of consciousness. The suffering member is one thing, the sense
of suffering is another: how does this happen?
By transmission, they will say: the psychic pneuma [= the semi-material
principle of life] stationed at the finger suffers first; and stage by
stage the trouble is passed on until at last it reaches the centre of
consciousness.
But on this theory, there must be a sensation in the spot first
suffering pain, and another sensation at a second point of the line of
transmission, another in the third and so on; many sensations, in fact
an unlimited series, to deal with one pain; and at the last moment the
centre of consciousness has the sensation of all these sensations and
of its own sensation to boot. Or to be exact, these serial sensations
will not be of the pain in the finger: the sensation next in succession
to the suffering finger will be of pain at the joint, a third will tell
of a pain still higher up: there will be a series of separate pains:
The centre of consciousness will not feel the pain seated at the
finger, but only that impinging upon itself: it will know this alone,
ignore the rest and so have no notion that the finger is in pain.
Thus: Transmission would not give sensation of the actual condition at
the affected spot: it is not in the nature of body that where one part
suffers there should be knowledge in another part; for body is a
magnitude, and the parts of every magnitude are distinct parts;
therefore we need, as the sentient, something of a nature to be
identical to itself at any and every spot; this property can belong
only to some other form of being than body.
8. It can be shown also that the intellectual act would similarly be
impossible if the soul were any form of body.
If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul's employment of the
body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be
identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart
from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and
the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense,
intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected,
it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of
intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing
magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing
that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of
what has parts? We will be told "By some partless part." But, at this,
the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole;
one point suffices. If then it be conceded -- and it cannot be denied
-- that the primal intellections deal with objects completely
incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue
of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all
intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always
takes place by abstraction from the bodies [in which these forms
appear] and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For
assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or
point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any
kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the
material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly
it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without
magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them.
When such non-magnitudes come before the soul, it receives them by
means of its partless phase and they will take position there in
partless wise.
Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues --
moral excellence [Sophrosyne], justice, courage and so forth? All these
could be only some kind of rarefied body [pneuma], or blood in some
form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that
pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie
wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness
as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their
bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough
with the idea of rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want
with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being
comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or
pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft
around it: what could it care about a just distribution?
Then consider the objects of the soul's contemplation, virtue and the
other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal
or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then
perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there,
again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul's
contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the
concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not
bodies: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature:
it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is
a thing of flux.
8. A. [sometimes appearing as 9] There are those who insist on the
activities observed in bodies -- warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing
-- and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. This
ignores the double fact that the very bodies themselves exercise such
efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers operating in them, and
that these are not the powers we attribute to soul: intellection,
perception, reasoning, desire, wise and effective action in all
regards, these point to a very different form of being.
In transferring to bodies the powers of the unembodied, this school
leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is precisely in
virtue of bodiless powers that bodies possess their efficiency is clear
from certain reflections:
It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different things,
that body is always a thing of quantity but not always a thing of
quality: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied
that quality, being a different thing from quantity, is a different
thing from body. Obviously quality could not be body when it has not
quantity as all body must; and, again, as we have said, body, any thing
of mass, on being reduced to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but
the quality it possessed remains intact in every particle -- for
instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck --
this shows that sweetness and all other qualities are not body.
Further: if the powers in question were bodies, then necessarily the
stronger powers would be large masses and those less efficient small
masses: but if there are large masses with small while not a few of the
smaller masses manifest great powers, then the efficiency must be
vested in something other than magnitude; efficacy, thus, belongs to
non-magnitude. Again; Matter, they tell us, remains unchanged as long
as it is body, but produces variety upon accepting qualities; is not
this proof enough that the entrants [with whose arrival the changes
happen] are Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order?
They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer
present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are
many other things of which none could possibly be soul: and neither
pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being; but soul is.
8. B. (10) If the soul is body and permeates the entire body-mass,
still even in this entire permeation the blending must be in accord
with what occurs in all cases of bodily admixing.
Now: if in the admixing of bodies neither constituent can retain its
efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the bodies;
it could but be latent; it will have lost that by which it is soul,
just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears: we
have, thus, no soul.
Two bodies [i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human body] are
blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one
is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the
whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture:
the one body thus inblended can have left in the other nothing
undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable
portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the
incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point -- an
impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater;
still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout. Now if,
thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided
material anywhere, the division of the body concerned must have been a
division into (geometrical) points: an impossibility. The division is
an infinite series -- any material particle may be cut in two -- and
the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual.
Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole.
But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.
8. C. (11) We come to the theory that this pneuma is an earlier form,
one which on entering the cold and being tempered by it develops into
soul by growing finer under that new condition. This is absurd at the
start, since many living beings rise in warmth and have a soul that has
been tempered by cold: still that is the theory -- the soul has an
earlier form, and develops its true nature by force of external
accidents. Thus these teachers make the inferior precede the higher,
and before that inferior they put something still lower, their
"Habitude." It is obvious that the Intellectual-Principle is last and
has sprung from the soul, for, if it were first of all, the order of
the series must be, second the soul, then the nature-principle, and
always the later inferior, as the system actually stands.
If they treat God as they do the Intellectual-Principle -- as later,
engendered and deriving intellection from without -- soul and intellect
and God may prove to have no existence: this would follow if a
potentiality could not come to existence, or does not become actual,
unless the corresponding actuality exists. And what could lead it
onward if there were no separate being in previous actuality? Even on
the absurd supposition that the potentially existent brings itself to
actuality, it must be looking to some Term, and that must be no
potentiality but actual.
No doubt the eternally self-identical may have potentiality and be
self-led to self-realization, but even in this case the being
considered as actualized is of higher order than the being considered
as merely capable of actualization and moving towards a desired Term.
Thus the higher is the earlier, and it has a nature other than body,
and it exists always in actuality: Intellectual-Principle and Soul
precede Nature: thus, Soul does not stand at the level of pneuma or of
body.
These arguments are sufficient in themselves, though many others have
been framed, to show that the soul is not to be thought of as a body.
8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What is this? Is it
something which, while distinct from body, still belongs to it, for
example a harmony or accord?
The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul is, with
some difference, comparable to the accord in the strings of a lyre.
When the lyre is strung a certain condition is produced upon the
strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our body is
formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend
produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing
upon the bodily total.
That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The
soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul
rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could
not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due
blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials which constitute our
frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering
as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul [its
own accord or note], so that there would be many souls to each person.
Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul
to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument,
there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his
own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical
strings nor human bodies could put themselves in tune.
Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered becomes
orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul, soul
itself owes its substantial existence to order -- which is self-caused.
Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that of Wholes could this
be true. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or accord.
8. E. (13) We come to the doctrine of the Entelechy, and must enquire
how it is applied to soul.
It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the
rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body -- not,
then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a
natural organic body having the potentiality of life.
Now; if the soul has been so injected as to be assimilated into the
body as the design of a statue is worked into the bronze, it will
follow that, upon any dividing of the body, the soul is divided with
it, and if any part of the body is cut away a fragment of soul must go
with it. Since an Entelechy must be inseparable from the being of which
it is the accomplished actuality, the withdrawal of the soul in sleep
cannot occur; in fact sleep itself cannot occur. Moreover if the soul
is an Entelechy, there is an end to the resistance offered by reason to
the desires; the total [of body and Entelechy-Soul] must have
one-uniform experience throughout, and be aware of no internal
contradiction. Sense-perception might occur; but intellection would be
impossible. The very upholders of the Entelechy are thus compelled to
introduce another soul, the Intellect, to which they ascribe
immortality. The reasoning soul, then, must be an Entelechy -- if the
word is to be used at all -- in some other mode.
Even the sense-perceiving soul, in its possession of the impressions of
absent objects, must hold these without aid from the body; for
otherwise the impression must be present in it like shape and images,
and that would mean that it could not take in fresh impressions; the
perceptive soul, then, cannot be described as this Entelechy
inseparable from the body. Similarly the desiring principle, dealing
not only with food and drink but with things quite apart from body;
this also is no inseparable Entelechy.
There remains the vegetal principle which might seem to suggest the
possibility that, in this phase, the soul may be the inseparable
Entelechy of the doctrine. But it is not so. The principle of every
growth lies at the root; in many plants the new springing takes place
at the root or just above it: it is clear that the life-principle, the
vegetal soul, has abandoned the upper portions to concentrate itself at
that one spot: it was therefore not present in the whole as an
inseparable Entelechy. Again, before the plant's development the
life-principle is situated in that small beginning: if, thus, it passes
from large growth to small and from the small to the entire growth, why
should it not pass outside altogether?
An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present
partwise in the partible body?
An identical soul is now the soul of one living being now of another:
how could the soul of the first become the soul of the latter if soul
were the Entelechy of one particular being? Yet that this transference
does occur is evident from the facts of animal metasomatosis.
The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon
serving as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come into
being by finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the
soul of some particular, for example, of a living being, whose body
would by this doctrine be the author of its soul.
What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither body nor a state or
experience of body, but is act and creation: if it holds much and gives
much, and is an existence outside of body; of what order and character
must it be? Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The
other order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process; it appears and it
perishes; in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected,
in so far as it has the capacity, by participating in what
authentically is.
9. (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is
self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes
away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things
never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining
principle of things individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its
maintenance and its ordered system to the soul.
This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and
provider of motion to all else: it moves by its own quality, and every
living material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives
in a life that, being essentially innate, can never fail.
Not all things can have a life merely at second hand; this would give
an infinite series: there must be some nature which, having life
primally, shall be of necessity indestructible, immortal, as the source
of life to all else that lives. This is the point at which all that is
divine and blessed must be situated, living and having being of itself,
possessing primal being and primal life, and in its own essence
rejecting all change, neither coming to be nor passing away.
Whence could such a being arise or into what could it disappear: the
very word, strictly used, means that the thing is perdurable. Similarly
white, the colour, cannot be now white and now not white: if this
"white" were a real being it would be eternal as well as being white:
the colour is merely white but whatsoever possesses being, indwelling
by nature and primal, will possess also eternal duration. In such an
entity this primal and eternal Being cannot be dead like stone or
plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it
remains self-gathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior
principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without
suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its
earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own.
10. (15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature, the
eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not material:
besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it tangible. But there
are other proofs.
Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses a
life beneficent and wise, we take the next step and begin with working
out the nature of our own soul.
Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the unreasoned
desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other such emotion and
experience, but one that has cast all this aside, and as far as
possible has no commerce with the bodily. Such a soul demonstrates that
all evil is accretion, alien, and that in the purged soul the noble
things are immanent, wisdom and all else that is good, as its native
store.
If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny that it
is the nature we have identified with all the divine and eternal?
Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be found in the
chattel mean and mortal: what possesses these must be divine by its
very capacity of the divine, the token of kinship and of identical
substance.
Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will differ but
little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals; he will be less
than they only to the extent in which the soul is, in him, associated
with body.
This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a
great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so
incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It is because
we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass that it becomes
difficult to recognize their divinity and immortality.
To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed
state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look: or,
rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he will not
doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered into the pure,
the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an Intellectual-Principle
looking on nothing of sense, nothing of this mortality, but by its own
eternity having intellection of the eternal: he will see all things in
this Intellectual substance, himself having become an Intellectual
Kosmos and all lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The
Good, which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of
the divine.
Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word "Farewell: I am to you
an immortal God," for he has ascended to the Supreme, and is all one
strain to enter into likeness with it.
If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then,
too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic
knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself
that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of
its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp
of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal
state; what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to
purity.
Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all
that kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing itself as
gold; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its
worth and knows that it has no need of any other glory than its own,
triumphant if only it be allowed to remain purely to itself.
11. (16) What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a
value, one in which there is a life self-springing and therefore not to
be destroyed?
This is at any rate a life not imported from without, not present in
the mode of the heat in fire -- for if heat is characteristic of the
fire proper, it certainly is adventitious to the Matter underlying the
fire; or fire, too, would be everlasting -- it is not in any such mode
that the soul has life: this is no case of a Matter underlying and a
life brought into that Matter and making it into soul [as heat comes
into matter and makes it fire].
Either life is Essential Reality, and therefore self-living -- the very
thing we have been seeking -- and undeniably immortal: or it, too, is a
compound and must be traced back through all the constituents until an
immortal substance is reached, something deriving movement from itself,
and therefore debarred from accepting death.
Even supposing life could be described as a condition imposed upon
Matter, still the source from which this condition entered the Matter
must necessarily be admitted to be immortal simply by being unable to
take into itself the opposite of the life which it conveys.
Of course, life is no such mere condition, but an independent
principle, effectively living.
12. (17) A further consideration is that if every soul is to be held
dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be: if it is
pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is mortal, and
another, that of the All, let us suppose, is immortal, we demand to
know the reason of the difference alleged.
Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches the
same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of the
celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking to win to
what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the primal source.
Again: the soul's understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of the
visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such perception is
reminiscence; the soul then must have its being before embodiment, and
drawing on an eternal science, must itself be eternal.
Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment, must
in the nature of things be broken apart by that very mode which brought
it together: but the soul is one and simplex, living not in the sense
of potential reception of life but by its own energy; and this can be
no cause of dissolution.
But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been divided
(in the body) and so becoming fragmentary.
No: the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity.
May not it change and so come to destruction?
No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the underlying
substance: and that could not happen to anything except a compound.
If it can be destroyed in no such ways, it is necessarily
indestructible.
13. (18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of
the Intellectual?
There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the
intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this,
knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm.
But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired
appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step
outward; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it
has seen in the Intellectual-Principle: pregnant by those Beings, and
in pain to the birth, it is eager to make, to create. In this new zest
it strains towards the realm of sense: thus, while this primal soul in
union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it
is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its
concern: yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself
to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is
not wholly and exclusively held by body: it is still in possession of
the unembodied; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. As
a whole it is partly in body, partly outside: it has plunged from among
the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been
an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself
remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the
universe with beauty and penetrant order -- immortal mind, eternal in
its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul.
14. (19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the
degree of entering brute bodies, these too must be immortal. And if
there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible
origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of
life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order.
All have sprung from one source, all have life as their own, all are
incorporeal, indivisible, all are real-beings.
If we are told that man's soul being tripartite must as a compound
entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their
emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at birth, all
that increment which the others will long retain.
But even that inferior phase thus laid aside will not be destroyed as
long as its source continues to exist, for nothing from the realm of
real being shall pass away.
15. (20) Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to
those asking for demonstration: those whose need is conviction by
evidence of the more material order are best met from the abundant
records relevant to the subject: there are also the oracles of the Gods
ordering the appeasing of wronged souls and the honouring of the dead
as still sentient, a practice common to all mankind: and again, not a
few souls, once among men, have continued to serve them after quitting
the body and by revelations, practically helpful, make clear, as well,
that the other souls, too, have not ceased to be.
__________________________________________________________________
EIGHTH TRACTATE.
THE SOUL'S DESCENT INTO BODY.
1. Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself;
becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a
marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the
loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the
divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised
above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet,
there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and
after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I
can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body,
the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown
itself to be.
Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of
compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of ascent and
descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is weariness to keep
toiling at the same things and always beginning again"; but he seems to
teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine
clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within
ourselves as he sought for himself and found.
Empedocles -- where he says that it is law for faulty souls to descend
to this sphere, and that he himself was here because he turned a
deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord -- reveals
neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to
convey on this as on many other matters; but in his case, versification
has some part in the obscurity.
We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble
sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry
into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him.
What do we learn from this philosopher?
We will not find him so consistent throughout that it is easy to
discover his mind.
Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of sense,
blames the commerce of the soul with body as an enchainment, an
entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries
that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the
Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the breaking of the
fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures of the wayfaring
toward the Intellectual Realm.
In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the entry
to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul after it
has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and necessities
driving other souls down to this order.
In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at
body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the
kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given
by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things
might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned
to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a reason,
then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God: in the
same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe
may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual
should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the
realm of sense.
2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves
forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general -- to discover
what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with
body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling
or in any way at all, soul has its activity.
We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has planned
well or ill. . . . . . like our souls, which it may be, are such that
governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and deeper
into it if they are to control it.
No doubt the individual body -- though in all cases appropriately
placed within the universe -- is of itself in a state of dissolution,
always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome
forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always
gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but
the body inhabited by the World-Soul -- complete, competent,
self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature -- this needs
no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is
undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable
neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.
This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association
with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty
ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does
not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of
servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of
the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no
hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not
every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from
its own sure standing in the highest.
The soul's care for the universe takes two forms: there is the
supervising of the entire system, brought to order by deedless command
in a kindly presidence, and there is that over the individual, implying
direct action, the hand to the task, one might say, in immediate
contact: in the second kind of care the agent absorbs much of the
nature of its object.
Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul's
method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with
penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no longer be charged
with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been deprived of its natural
standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that
rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the
course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither
failing ever nor ever beginning.
Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as
the All to the material forms within it -- for these starry bodies are
declared to be members of the soul's circuit -- we are given to
understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of
transcendence and immunity that becomes them.
And so we might expect: commerce with the body is repudiated for two
only reasons, as hindering the soul's intellective act and as filling
with pleasure, desire, pain; but neither of these misfortunes can
befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into the body, is not a
slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an order as to have no need
and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor
fear.
There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to
such a body nor is there any such preoccupied concern, bringing about a
veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed
vision; it remains always intent upon the Supreme, and its governance
of this universe is effected by a power not calling upon act.
3. The Human Soul, next;
Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a
victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the
body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or cavern.
Now this does not clash with the first theory [that of the impassivity
of soul as in the All]; for the descent of the human Soul has not been
due to the same causes [as that of the All-Soul.]
All that is Intellectual-Principle has its being -- whole and all -- in
the place of Intellection, what we call the Intellectual Kosmos: but
there exist, too, the intellective powers included in its being, and
the separate intelligences -- for the Intellectual-Principle is not
merely one; it is one and many. In the same way there must be both many
souls and one, the one being the source of the differing many just as
from one genus there rise various species, better and worse, some of
the more intellectual order, others less effectively so.
In the Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made: there is the
Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living organism
contains potentially all the other forms; and there are the forms thus
potentially included now realized as individuals. We may think of it as
a city which itself has soul and life, and includes, also, other forms
of life; the living city is the more perfect and powerful, but those
lesser forms, in spite of all, share in the one same living quality:
or, another illustration, from fire, the universal, proceed both the
great fire and the minor fires; yet all have the one common essence,
that of fire the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from
which the essence of the universal fire proceeds.
No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning
phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would
be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To its quality of
being intellective it adds the quality by which it attains its
particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an
Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as
everything must that exists among real beings.
It looks towards its higher and has intellection; towards itself and
conserves its peculiar being; towards its lower and orders,
administers, governs.
The total of things could not have remained stationary in the
Intellectual Kosmos, once there was the possibility of continuous
variety, of beings inferior but as necessarily existent as their
superiors.
4. So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine
Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a
power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared
to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its
presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they
remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the
heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators
with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing
with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed
[as distinguished from the kosmos] are thus far in the one place with
their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the
universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of
standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own.
This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its
differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the
Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care,
intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one
form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring
for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things:
thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence,
it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends
to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths
it henceforth sinks far.
With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the
enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the
higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier
state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.
It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now
through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a
captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul.
But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a
conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles
and soars -- when only it makes its memories the starting point of a
new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in
both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by
turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more
continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where
character or circumstances are less favourable.
All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he
distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as
"parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial,
they must of necessity experience birth.
Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood
as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations; what is
rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into
being by generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred,
for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are
eternal.
5. It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions -- the
divine sowing to birth, as opposed to a voluntary descent aiming at the
completion of the universe; the judgement and the cave; necessity and
free choice -- in fact the necessity includes the choice-embodiment as
an evil; the Empedoclean teaching of a flight from God, a wandering
away, a sin bringing its punishment; the "solace by flight" of
Heraclitus; in a word a voluntary descent which is also voluntary.
All degeneration is no doubt involuntary, yet when it has been brought
about by an inherent tendency, that submission to the inferior may be
described as the penalty of an act.
On the other hand these experiences and actions are determined by an
external law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a being
which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve the needs of
another: hence there is no inconsistency or untruth in saying that the
soul is sent down by God; final results are always to be referred to
the starting point even across many intervening stages.
Still there is a twofold flaw: the first lies in the motive of the
Soul's descent [its audacity, its Tolma], and the second in the evil it
does when actually here: the first is punished by what the soul has
suffered by its descent: for the faults committed here, the lesser
penalty is to enter into body after body -- and soon to return -- by
judgement according to desert, the word judgement indicating a divine
ordinance; but any outrageous form of ill-doing incurs a
proportionately greater punishment administered under the surveillance
of chastising daimons.
Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier
realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of the divine:
but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to
its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if
it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by
acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is,
by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those
activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the
unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never
to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known
that suppressed and inhibited total.
The act reveals the power, a power hidden, and we might almost say
obliterated or nonexistent, unless at some moment it became effective:
in the world as it is, the richness of the outer stirs us all to the
wonder of the inner whose greatness is displayed in acts so splendid.
6. Something besides a unity there must be or all would be
indiscernibly buried, shapeless within that unbroken whole: none of the
real beings [of the Intellectual Kosmos] would exist if that unity
remained at halt within itself: the plurality of these beings,
offspring of the unity, could not exist without their own nexts taking
the outward path; these are the beings holding the rank of souls.
In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls,
their issue stifled: every Kind must produce its next; it must unfold
from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance
to its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will
remain unalterably in the native seat; but there is the lower phase,
begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as
it exists in the Supreme.
To this power we cannot impute any halt, any limit of jealous grudging;
it must move for ever outward until the universe stands accomplished to
the ultimate possibility. All, thus, is produced by an inexhaustible
power giving its gift to the universe, no part of which it can endure
to see without some share in its being.
There is, besides, no principle that can prevent anything from
partaking, to the extent of its own individual receptivity in the
Nature of Good. If therefore Matter has always existed, that existence
is enough to ensure its participation in the being which, according to
each receptivity, communicates the supreme good universally: if on the
contrary, Matter has come into being as a necessary sequence of the
causes preceding it, that origin would similarly prevent it standing
apart from the scheme as though it were out of reach of the principle
to whose grace it owes its existence.
In sum: The loveliness that is in the sense-realm is an index of the
nobleness of the Intellectual sphere, displaying its power and its
goodness alike: and all things are for ever linked; the one order
Intellectual in its being, the other of sense; one self-existent, the
other eternally taking its being by participation in that first, and to
the full of its power reproducing the Intellectual nature.
7. The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the
Intellectual against the sensible: better for the soul to dwell in the
Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to
participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not
being, through and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the
authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme
of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it
communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in
turn whenever -- instead of employing in its government only its
safeguarded phase -- it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst
of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with
whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by
turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered
here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the Supreme, and more
clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost
their direct antithesis. Where the faculty is incapable of knowing
without contact, the experience of evil brings the dearer perception of
Good.
The outgoing that takes place in the Intellectual-Principle is a
descent to its own downward ultimate: it cannot be a movement to the
transcendent; operating necessarily outwards from itself, wherein it
may not stay inclosed, the need and law of Nature bring it to its
extreme term, to soul -- to which it entrusts all the later stages of
being while itself turns back on its course.
The soul's operation is similar: its next lower act is this universe:
its immediate higher is the contemplation of the Authentic Existences.
To individual souls such divine operation takes place only at one of
their phases and by a temporal process when from the lower in which
they reside they turn towards the noblest; but that soul, which we know
as the All-Soul, has never entered the lower activity, but, immune from
evil, has the property of knowing its lower by inspection, while it
still cleaves continuously to the beings above itself; thus its double
task becomes possible; it takes thence and, since as soul it cannot
escape touching this sphere, it gives hither.
8. And -- if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of
a personal conviction clashing with the general view -- even our human
soul has not sunk entire; something of it is continuously in the
Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of
sense, hold the mastery, or rather be mastered here and troubled, it
keeps us blind to what the upper phase holds in contemplation.
The object of the Intellectual Act comes within our ken only when it
reaches downward to the level of sensation: for not all that occurs at
any part of the soul is immediately known to us; a thing must, for that
knowledge, be present to the total soul; thus desire locked up within
the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours
by the central faculty of perception, or by the individual choice or by
both at once. Once more, every soul has something of the lower on the
body side and something of the higher on the side of the
Intellectual-Principle.
The Soul of the All, as an entirety, governs the universe through that
part of it which leans to the body side, but since it does not exercise
a will based on calculation as we do -- but proceeds by purely
intellectual act as in the execution of an artistic conception -- its
ministrance is that of a labourless overpoising, only its lowest phase
being active upon the universe it embellishes.
The souls that have gone into division and become appropriated to some
thing partial have also their transcendent phase, but are preoccupied
by sensation, and in the mere fact of exercising perception they take
in much that clashes with their nature and brings distress and trouble
since the object of their concern is partial, deficient, exposed to
many alien influences, filled with desires of its own and taking its
pleasure, that pleasure which is its lure.
But there is always the other, that which finds no savour in passing
pleasure, but holds its own even way.
__________________________________________________________________
NINTH TRACTATE.
ARE ALL SOULS ONE?.
1. That the Soul of every individual is one thing we deduce from the
fact that it is present entire at every point of the body -- the sign
of veritable unity -- not some part of it here and another part there.
In all sensitive beings the sensitive soul is an omnipresent unity, and
so in the forms of vegetal life the vegetal soul is entire at each
several point throughout the organism.
Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one,
and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the
several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate
items, but an omnipresent identity?
If the soul in me is a unity, why need that in the universe be
otherwise seeing that there is no longer any question of bulk or body?
And if that, too, is one soul and yours, and mine, belongs to it, then
yours and mine must also be one: and if, again, the soul of the
universe and mine depend from one soul, once more all must be one.
What then in itself is this one soul?
First we must assure ourselves of the possibility of all souls being
one as that of any given individual is.
It must, no doubt, seem strange that my soul and that of any and
everybody else should be one thing only: it might mean my feelings
being felt by someone else, my goodness another's too, my desire, his
desire, all our experience shared with each other and with the
(one-souled) universe, so that the very universe itself would feel
whatever I felt.
Besides how are we to reconcile this unity with the distinction of
reasoning soul and unreasoning, animal soul and vegetal?
Yet if we reject that unity, the universe itself ceases to be one thing
and souls can no longer be included under any one principle.
2. Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not
enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical
thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the
identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is
stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in
any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the
transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a
hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand
as represented in the centralizing unity.
In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would
have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would
the souls feel as one.
We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in
one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when
the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a
whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to
traverse the organism.
Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the
resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the
entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the
experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full
impression on the sense there need not be.
That one identical soul should be virtuous in me and vicious in someone
else is not strange: it is only saying that an identical thing may be
active here and inactive there.
We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete
negation of multiplicity -- only of the Supreme can that be affirmed --
we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in
the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of
belonging to that Order which suffers no division.
In myself some experience occurring in a part of the body may take no
effect upon the entire man but anything occurring in the higher reaches
would tell upon the partial: in the same way any influx from the All
upon the individual will have manifest effect since the points of
sympathetic contact are numerous -- but as to any operation from
ourselves upon the All there can be no certainty.
3. Yet, looking at another set of facts, reflection tells us that we
are in sympathetic relation to each other, suffering, overcome, at the
sight of pain, naturally drawn to forming attachments; and all this can
be due only to some unity among us.
Again, if spells and other forms of magic are efficient even at a
distance to attract us into sympathetic relations, the agency can be no
other than the one soul.
A quiet word induces changes in a remote object, and makes itself heard
at vast distances -- proof of the oneness of all things within the one
soul.
But how reconcile this unity with the existence of a reasoning soul, an
unreasoning, even a vegetal soul?
[It is a question of powers]: the indivisible phase is classed as
reasoning because it is not in division among bodies, but there is the
later phase, divided among bodies, but still one thing and distinct
only so as to secure sense-perception throughout; this is to be classed
as yet another power; and there is the forming and making phase which
again is a power. But a variety of powers does not conflict with unity;
seed contains many powers and yet it is one thing, and from that unity
rises, again, a variety which is also a unity.
But why are not all the powers of this unity present everywhere?
The answer is that even in the case of the individual soul described,
similarly, as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in
all the parts, reason does not operate at every point, the principle of
growth is at work where there is no sensation -- and yet all these
powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside.
The nourishing faculty as dependent from the All belongs also to the
All-Soul: why then does it not come equally from ours?
Because what is nourished by the action of this power is a member of
the All, which itself has sensation passively; but the perception,
which is an intellectual judgement, is individual and has no need to
create what already exists, though it would have done so had the power
not been previously included, of necessity, in the nature of the All.
4. These reflections should show that there is nothing strange in that
reduction of all souls to one. But it is still necessary to enquire
into the mode and conditions of the unity.
Is it the unity of origin in a unity? And if so, is the one divided or
does it remain entire and yet produce variety? and how can an essential
being, while remaining its one self, bring forth others?
Invoking God to become our helper, let us assert, that the very
existence of many souls makes certain that there is first one from
which the many rise.
Let us suppose, even, the first soul to be corporeal.
Then [by the nature of body] the many souls could result only from the
splitting up of that entity, each an entirely different substance: if
this body-soul be uniform in kind, each of the resultant souls must be
of the one kind; they will all carry the one Form undividedly and will
differ only in their volumes. Now, if their being souls depended upon
their volumes they would be distinct; but if it is ideal-form that
makes them souls, then all are, in virtue of this Idea, one.
But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed
among many bodies, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not
thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be
thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity -- much as a
multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode
the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second
mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or
modification of body, we could not wonder that this quality -- this one
thing from one source -- should be present in many objects. The same
reasoning would apply if soul were an effect [or manifestation] of the
Conjoint.
We, of course, hold it to be bodiless, an essential existence.
5. How then can a multitude of essential beings be really one?
Obviously either the one essence will be entire in all, or the many
will rise from a one which remains unaltered and yet includes the one
-- many in virtue of giving itself, without self-abandonment, to its
own multiplication.
It is competent thus to give and remain, because while it penetrates
all things it can never itself be sundered: this is an identity in
variety.
There is no reason for dismissing this explanation: we may think of a
science with its constituents standing as one total, the source of all
those various elements: again, there is the seed, a whole, producing
those new parts in which it comes to its division; each of the new
growths is a whole while the whole remains undiminished: only the
material element is under the mode of part, and all the multiplicity
remains an entire identity still.
It may be objected that in the case of science the constituents are not
each the whole.
But even in the science, while the constituent selected for handling to
meet a particular need is present actually and takes the lead, still
all the other constituents accompany it in a potential presence, so
that the whole is in every part: only in this sense [of particular
attention] is the whole science distinguished from the part: all, we
may say, is here simultaneously effected: each part is at your disposal
as you choose to take it; the part invites the immediate interest, but
its value consists in its approach to the whole.
The detail cannot be considered as something separate from the entire
body of speculation: so treated it would have no technical or
scientific value; it would be childish divagation. The one detail, when
it is a matter of science, potentially includes all. Grasping one such
constituent of his science, the expert deduces the rest by force of
sequence.
[As a further illustration of unity in plurality] the geometrician, in
his analysis, shows that the single proposition includes all the items
that go to constitute it and all the propositions which can be
developed from it.
It is our feebleness that leads to doubt in these matters; the body
obscures the truth, but There all stands out clear and separate.
__________________________________________________________________
THE FIFTH ENNEAD
__________________________________________________________________
FIRST TRACTATE.
THE THREE INITIAL HYPOSTASES.
1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God,
and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore
at once themselves and It?
The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the
entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation
with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this
freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried
down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they
came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child
wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance
will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the
same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature;
ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their
respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and
admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken
apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have
deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of
themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.
Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and
nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and perish,
nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else
it admires could ever form any notion of either the nature or the power
of God.
A double discipline must be applied if human beings in this pass are to
be reclaimed, and brought back to their origins, lifted once more
towards the Supreme and One and First.
There is the method, which we amply exhibit elsewhere, declaring the
dishonour of the objects which the Soul holds here in honour; the
second teaches or recalls to the soul its race and worth; this latter
is the leading truth, and, clearly brought out, is the evidence of the
other.
It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to which it
is the natural preliminary: the seeker is soul and it must start from a
true notion of the nature and quality by which soul may undertake the
search; it must study itself in order to learn whether it has the
faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the object proposed, whether in
fact we ought to seek; for if the object is alien the search must be
futile, while if there is relationship the solution of our problem is
at once desirable and possible.
2. Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is
the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into
them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of
the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun;
itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that
rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which
it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more
honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them
life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is
of eternal being.
How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate
beings in it may be thus conceived:
That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean,
a